Word of mouth is on fire.

The control of brands is shifting from the companies to people. According to Forrester Research, 1 in 3 of adults online want to hear the opinion of a friend or family before making purchasing decisions. More people are using social networks and trusted influencers to aid in their purchasing decisions.

Social Radar can help you manage your brand using one of the biggest content collections in the world. Talk of your brand, company, or products can be measured and managed.

How is the new social web changing your marketing strategies?

The ability to simply listen to social chatter lets you engage customers and thought leaders like never before.

Gain valuable feedback on your products and services not coming from focus groups or complicated marketing research techniques, but from the unfiltered voices of your customer base.

Target negative feedback and use it as a chance to engage someone and create a positive customer service situation where none existed before.

Target highly influential people in your industry and leverage the trust they have built with their readership to put your product/service in front of the right people.

Understand the happenings and trends in your industry as well as activities of your competitors.

Keeping a blind eye to the conversations on the web and tracking the wrong statistics can create a very unrealistic perception of what people truly talk about and how they feel about your brand. Don’t be left in the dark.

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One of the powers of emerging technologies is allowing companies to niche market like never before. Using Social Radar allows me to begin building a strategy around social media monitoring and, down the line, customer engagement. This is the first post in a series that will describe the significance of this tool in your usage of social media as a company.

Social Media Monitoring

Social Media Monitoring is becoming more and more popular and essential for companies. For better or for worse, your brand is not completely in your hands. Any person can talk about different aspects of your company in a variety of forms and make their opinion public for potentially millions of people to read using social networks and online tools. It is absolutely imperative that all companies begin to monitor their brand, products, and industry on the internet. Specifically, within the social media world. More people are participating more frequently in social networks every day. Perhaps they are a “fad,” but do you want to take that chance? With all of these online tools, it is becoming easier and easier for more people to become content creators online instead of just content consumers.

Using Social Radar allows you to monitor your company in as many or as few ways as you like. Monitoring is listening. How many times are we told that a good businessperson or a good salesperson is someone who has the ability to listen and deliver? Now you can listen to people talking in social media and utilize their feedback immediately. The information flows in real time, as if you can sit in a stadium full of people and hear only the conversations you want. Can you imagine receiving that kind of instant feedback? Now you can. With Social Radar, you can retrieve content instantly without having to scrape the entire internet or wait for aggregation. This allows for lightning fast and accurate analysis.

Social Radar allows you to build a query you can carry across multiple tools to track trends, key influencers, and even just the posts themselves. You can continue to build and refine your social media monitoring platform in one place using all the tools available from Social Radar. All content created in social media is time sensitive and is attached to specific dates, so you know when things are said, not just that they exist. This is key for information gathering and allows you to plan for the future.

So the questions are…

Are people talking about your company? Product? Industry?

Are you tuning into your customers and what they are saying?

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Social Networking is changing every day. New services are spawning constantly with new and creative ways to interact with others. Popularity is shifting between these services. But, where will it go from here? Where should it go from here?

I think the key ingredient to the future of Social Networking is mobility. Many services like Twitter, Brightkite, Flickr and others are starting to add some great mobile support, but I believe there are more great things to come. What I’d love to see is a centralized social networking application that comes standard on smartphones and other mobile phones. That will help generate mass appeal and more widespread use. This application would need to take more advantage of the GPS capabilities that are gaining traction in smartphones and provide the ability to view people near you with no involvement whatsoever. Imagine walking into a bar or club, taking your cell phone out of your pocket and seeing a list of people in the bar that want to chat and meet. Imagine being able to send a message to anyone in the area saying “I’m shy, come talk to me.” Socializing would be revolutionized. Making a new friend or meeting a new guy or girl could be accomplished by simply walking in the door.

So, it starts with more mass mobility and widespread use. Then, the possibilities become more and more exciting. You could walk in a restaurant and send a message to people eating at the restaurant for a recommendation on what to order. You could talk to people in an airport and find someone to get coffee with you while you wait for your flight. I’d love to be able to see stats around the city - how many people are where and who’s doing what. Just think of how fantastic it would be to have the option of viewing the most popular events around the city in real-time or check out a map of a specific area and see where the hot spots are at the moment. Data could be gathered from this service to pull some amazing analytics such as the amount of visitors a location gets on average, or what day of the week it receives the most traffic. The possibilities are quite endless.

As Social Networking expands, I’m sure we will see many of these desires become a reality. Our world is becoming more and more virtual and we need to be ready to adapt to it. I, for one am thrilled to be a part of it and am excited to see what the future holds.

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What is Twitter? A lot of people are starting to figure it out. But, many still do not understand it. It’s such a simple concept - update your status in 140 characters or less from your phone or computer which is sent out to anyone “following” you. You can follow others, and figure out where people are, what they are doing, and what they are thinking. It seems pointless to many, but yet there is an underlying value that isn’t so obvious. It allows instant communication and connection with the people from wherever you are at any time, restricted to a few sentences. There are many using it to connect on a business level, and not just a personal level. For example, Zappos.com is using Twitter to notify people of giveaways and prizes, which is creating a lot of chatter and followers for them, and in turn increasing awareness of their brand and their products. There are endless possibilities and many people are finding new ways to use Twitter every day. This concept is catching on like wildfire and people love it. But, a wild fire is exactly what it’s becoming.

Twitter’s popularity has been flourishing, and much of its success is due to South by Southwest, a conference that has one of the biggest Interactive events in the country. However, just within the last few months, their popularity has increased so much that they are leaving their Tweeters with nothing but error pages, feature down messages, and slowness. As with any unexpected growth, issues are likely. Luckily, the Tweeters are forgiving and chatter has stayed surprisingly positive throughout the social spectrum.

As Twitter continues to grow and they begin to support their growth, this platform for communication can be vastly expanded upon. There are so many features and concepts that can be derived from the groundwork that Twitter has created. I, for one, hope that they start focusing heavily on development to take this fantastic communication outlet to a whole new level.

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As social media grows and changes the internet as we know it, there is a huge opportunity for consumer-facing corporations to connect with their consumers. Blogs and Microblogs are quickly becoming a very common outlet for complaints, praises, and personal reviews of products from everyday people. Corporations now have a way of determining what’s good and what’s bad without surveys or by analyzing demographics and purchase patterns, leading to educated guesses. They can hear what the people want and why they will or will not spend their money on a product. This type of information is being made available today naturally by social media and the value of this information is practically unmeasurable.

Consumer-facing Corporations need to tap into this outlet and listen to the masses. Fix what the people want fixed, add what the people want added, and these people will spend their money. But more importantly, they will be happy. And not just happy about the product, but the company, and the brand. In turn, this will cause more positive chatter to spread on the internet around the product and company and ultimately, increase sales.

The power of social media is vastly underestimated by many large corporations and they must take the time to truly understand the potential and utilize this content.

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Welcome to the Infegy blog. We’re going to be using this blog to post neat statistics and findings from Social Radar, such as top blogs around an ecosystem, interesting trend comparisons, and more. We’re also going to be updating everyone on our progress as a business, as we grow and expand. We may also be posting our insights and things that we feel need to be addressed for the social media space. We welcome you all to check back often and post comments to our blog posts. We love hearing feedback.

We’re excited and we hope you enjoy it.

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