Monitor The Web for Brand Mentions

Online reputation management is essential.  Almost everyone is involved in social media these days.  Did you know??  Your customers are all over Facebook, Twitter, Blogs and message boards.  It's vital that you'll take a proactive approach to monitoring the conversation surrounding your brand actually.  In that situation you can find the important conversations and jump into them to strengthen brand by engaging with your target audience.

The good news is that there are plenty of great tools out there that can make it easy for you to monitor the internet for brand mentions.

Application you can used:

1) Google Alerts

2) HootSuite

3) Tweetdeck

4) Broad Tracker

In addition to monitoring the web for brand mentions, you can also tracking with the followings:

Keywords - can use the tools above to track mentions of important keywords related to your niche.  This is helpful for staying current on the industry developments, and it could present opportunities for you to jump into the conversations with the target audience.

Competitor mentions - it's always a good idea to keep an eye on the competition.  It's not only, you need to know what they're up to know what they're up to.  But it's also to helpful to see how their reputations is faring.

Links - Monitor the back-links, so that you can see anytime and someone else to the website or drops a link directed to your facebook or Twitter.

Employee mentions - the employees are the face of the company.  We need to know if they're doing anything that's going to reflect poorly on the brand.

Coupons as PR

I'm back!!!

Today i would like to discuss about coupons as PR.  

Can coupons can be used as a public relations tools?? or they are firmly in the marketing campaigns?  Business experts have argued about this for ages actually...and the influence of the internet hasn't exactly helped to settle the scores.

In fact, its probably blurred the lines even more website like Groupon, MAD and Foursquare are changing the face of the coupon and making it more of a way to interact with customers rather than simply get them in the store..right?

Whichever side you're on, marketing or public relations, it barely matters; what matters is getting those folks through the front door and buying the stuff.  Coupons are a great way to do that.  So how you all thinks that its effectively can used them as a PR tools??

In event???

One things website like Foursquare do so well is to create "hype" around a store's coupons.  The managers have been know to pull off some pretty elaborate situations for their business, resulting in a veritable swarm of new customers. For instance becoming "mayor" of a restaurant can get a customer free stuff like drinks, food or even merchandise. 

How it does translate to the public relations??

To stay mayor that long, user must go to the story to check-in.  If users are holding a contest to get these coupons, then people have a chance to talk to you and to their fellow customers about the experience in that place.  This is translate PR quite easily, especially if you also combine the experience with other social media in Facebook.

Other social media

Speaking of other social media, this is also a perfect way to bring public relations to the store while also giving the customers a break.  Many business will give out deals if folks "like" their own page or business page.  That;s a great way to bring in a new people.  The promise of future coupons can be a great way to ensure those users don't jet as soon as they're gotten what they need from their initial coupons.  Coupons can come in the mail all the time, but users wouldn't say that interacting with customers at all.  But to give people opportunity to "earn" them, like coming to the store and using their phone to check in, then it becomes something else entirely.

Social Media on the Rise - Declined

Social media rising to the top or sinking to the bottom when it comes to advertising and marketing.  It seem like we get a different answer depending on who we ask for?.  Some will say that it's on the decline, that people are beginning to realize there's no replacing a real live human.  Others says that's ridiculous and there's no time like the present to jump on the bandwagon..

What you choose??

The Rise
Clearly many aspects of social media on the rise considering the advent of brand new social media platforms every day.  Most of these are very specific platforms, like oneclimate which is platform for not to profit/social change organizations and lovers.  These randomly pop up and vanish all the time.  The enjoy a wide variety of success, depending on how large the niche is they operate within.  There are also major release like Google plus.  Plus is expected to make huge impact on the social media market landscape, taking on giants like Facebook and Twitter.

The Decline
When someone says social media is in decline, they don't mean the actual practice of it.  I've seen it more accurately describes as moving away from calling everything and more towards streamlining social media into the rest of the marketing in one smooth stream.  When business social media first started, people were unware of whether it was going to turn into just another way for companies to shill for their product.  This will caused the current practice to creating social identities for otherwise faceless companies.