Trackur: A Revolutionary Social Media Monitoring Tool

Today, web has made it possible for the individuals to discuss about your small business, therefore, it is imperative that you are made aware of what is going behind you, whether those are the praises or negative remarks made about your business.

I was using Google alert for this purpose, it is an effective multi-purpose tool that helps a lot in tracking keywords, content stealing and even to track the links coming to the site, until I found a new tracking tool which is launched for small business owners, last week. It is called trackur free tool; with this unique online monitoring technology, you can setup a search and can trace out the web contents related to your mentions. Trackur searches in all the traditional and social media websites and delivers you results through tracker dashboard, RSS, email or CSV export.

The only thing which separates Trackur free service from the paid one is that you can only search for one keyword at a time. For the Small business owners who are already using Google alerts, they can also make a good use of Trackur, if they want to focus on one specific term in detail. The best thing a tracker free has to offer is it runs every 30 minutes delivering a graph so that you can easily get up to date report of the changing opinions about your business. If you haven’t use it yet due to the price tag attached to it, now you can sign up and give it a try with Trackur free.

Thus, it will be a good idea to use Google alerts for finding easy terms that you are just casually monitoring, but for more refined results you can go with the Trackur.

How Privacy Is Evolving Online

How would an axe murder react against your privacy? It has been elaborated thoroughly and the issue raise in the article about privacy evolution has been defined genuinely. Of course change is inevitable and social media has played a major role to evolve privacy as we can meet up with our old friends through social media. Sharing information has become easier and the risk to share personal information with others is lower than before. In short, an old concept about privacy has totally changed today.

For more details check out Rohit Bhargava's article “Social Media & the Axe Murderer: How Privacy Is Evolving Online”, hope you'll enjoy reading it.

2010 - Stands as a Challenge to Marketers?

The thing which a marketer likes to adopt is challenge. Marketers have been treating the challenges effectively for years. Still there are various challenges standing in the way of marketers. Those challenges are the major concerns for the marketers to handle in 2010. Challenges that will most likely perturb marketers in 2010 are classified below:

1. Sustainability: After doing all the hard work in the past, marketers would be very desperate in order to make their customers stay with them. They would be planning strategies how to make their customers happy and make them stay for long as clients.

2. How to generate large revenues? Marketers would be focusing high on out of the box thinking to generate large revenues with minimum investment. They would be thinking for a greater ROI with minimum expenses and it would keep them awake at nights.

3. Would it be possible to keep the traffic up at the social media? This challenge would be on top list of the marketers to handle. Marketers would be thinking hard how to make their social media network robust so that more users interact with our social media marketing.

4. Platform to generate output: Marketers would have their eyes pointed at sales. They would be in the hunt for ground breaking ideas rather than cost effective ideas to increase their sales in order to generate a profitable output.

5. Keep up with the change: With the evolution of new marketing models, marketers’ think tank would be planning how to keep their pace up to the market standard so that they can lead the market.

6. Offering U.S.P against the best offer: Marketers would be thinking how to offer U.S.P against the best offer made by the competitor in order to make prospect/customer/client buy marketers product other than the competitor’s product.

7. What should be the plan of action against competitor? Whether the competitor attacks the marketer directly or indirectly or make a pessimistic comment against marketer, marketer would have something in back up to answer the competitor. Therefore, marketers would be thinking real to make some plan of actions against competitor’s attack.

8. Brand Promotion: Marketers would genuinely think how to run their marketing campaigns effectively to promote their brand. They would be in a deep search to make their brand value stand out among their target audience.

9. Planning marketing budgets: Planning marketing budget would be a critical challenge for the marketer as making the wrong decision against your marketing budget can ruin whole marketing business; therefore marketers would be thinking twice whether investing marketing budget to a certain business is beneficial or not.

10. Maintaining the customer’s loyalty: Marketers would be planning to maintain their customer’s loyalty. They would be searching for ideas how to make their loyal customer happy in order to build a robust relation with them.

Conclusion: One thing for sure challenges are meant to be faced and how effortlessly the marketers can handle those challenges no one can.

How to Monitor Social Media Conversations

Monitoring the activities over social media has become a hot topic lately. With an overwhelming success of online social media marketing platforms such as blogs, forums, micro-blogs and other social networking sites, people have open source to express what is in their mind and influence the thinking and behavior of other people. Monitoring the social media is keeping the track of all the discussions and conversations going on in the online business marketplace.

Monitoring of social media comprises of figuring out the objectives through listening, refining the discussions, analyzing and taking action. Moreover, monitoring of social media can be utilized by brands to improve product and service, customer service and feedback, marketing research and communication.

Listening

Listening of what people are talking about your brand, your competitors and the industry has foremost importance. People and their opinions influence consumer behavior. In order to show your customer service and to show that you value customer, watch out for any complaints against you or your competitor. In online world, prospective customers check other people opinions before making purchase decision.

Participating

Not only listening is necessary, participating and engaging in conversation with people online is also necessary. If you respond timely to any complaint or question, it will increase a consumer faith in your brand. Even if your brand has not talked about it’s essential to know the key influencers and what are they talking about. Start to discuss at places where you see potential and relevancy and establish your footprint so that you are equipped for any future talks of your brand.

Responding

During monitoring process, you understand the happenings and can implement relevant responses. If you respond properly to the queries, it will take you a long way to spread the good about your brand.

Using Applications

Many paid and free social media online applications are available to keep track of the conversations going on. It could be as simple as setting an alert through Google, Yahoo etc, searching for your brand name or the relevant keywords on Twitter, Social Media aggregators like Social Mention, Same Point, Back type and many others. There are several social media monitoring applications that can help in monitoring and analyzing your brand. For instance, radian6, Collective intellect and TechrigySM2 are some famous applications