social media

Monitoring, tracking, and responding to what others are writing about your company online is a relatively inexpensive and very effective strategy for building your brand's online reputation. It is an excellent way to learn about your customers, respond to issues before they get out of control, and generate customer loyalty that translates into increased sales.

The following free tools will help you stay on top of the conversation surrounding your business.

Google.com/alerts - Simply enter a search term, choose a "comprehensive" alert, choose how often you'd like it delivered, then enter your email address. You will receive updates every time any content with your keywords enters the GoogleSphere. This service will be even more useful when Google adds alert delivery via RSS.

Technorati.com - Technorati is the largest blog search engine. Add your RSS enabled website to Technorati and it will track other sites that link to you yours and add your blog to the Technorati network.

Backtype.com - This service does a scarily good job of tracking comments across the blogosphere. Type your name in to see all those pithy remarks you've made over the years. Type in your company's name to find out what people really think of your products and services.

Boardtracker.com - Indexes and tracks discussion board postings. Discussion boards were the original social media sites long before Facebook or MySpace existed. They often have a large, focused, and passionate user bases. If you want to have conversations with potential customers that care about what you do, then find and join the top discussion boards for your industry or area of interest.

Search.twitter.com - Twitter is of course the incredibly wonderful/annoying service that lets you update the world about every little thing that you do. While you may not use Twitter extensively, you will want to know if someone is twittering about your company, so try a search to see what comes up.

Yahoo Pipes - Yahoo Pipes allows users to get/pipe information from different sources and then set up rules for how that content should be filtered. Try searching for pipes that other users have built like the Social Media Firehose. You can modify existing pipes or create your own unique pipe to get your data just the way you want it.

Over the past few years marketers have focused on content creation as the primary means of "participation" in online communities. We've all been busy writing blogs, sending emails, building online communities, twittering, etc.. However, we would do well to take the time to seriously listen to our customers. Hopefully, these tools help.

When starting your typical open-source project, there is little or no monetary incentive for individuals to participate in the project. Participation is largely dependent on the brilliance and usefulness of the idea, the leadership of the project’s originators, and the platform for collaboration that is implemented.

Ideally, the software itself serves as a platform for collaboration and is designed to encourage participation in the project. This is the case with many popular content management systems like WordPress, Drupal, Mambo, etc.. These systems allow users to easily post content and create social networks that encourage a positive feedback loop of creativity and software development. Project participants end up creating a system, which allows them to work more effectively on the system they are creating.

Of all the content management systems I’ve worked with, Drupal does the best job of designing collaboration into the structure of the software itself. The design is simple, but fundamental to Drupal’s success. Drupal is a bare-bones framework that allows modules of code to be plugged into it. The modules provide nearly all functionality in the Drupal system. Each of these modules has its own maintainer who is often the module's creator.

This structure automatically creates a team environment, because each developer has her own piece of the pie so to speak and is committed to managing the development of her module. Further, there is a strong incentive to contribute modules to the project, since contributing a module gives the programmer credibility within the Drupal community, as well as the opportunity to have the community improve the programmer’s code. This simple mutually beneficial system drives Drupal's development.

Drupal also excels at organizing programmers and users in real communities around the world. There is one site and one module that contribute the most to the massive worldwide organization of Drupal communities. The sub domain Groups.drupal.org (GDO) runs off of the Organic Groups module, which allows for the creation of an infinite number of topic and location specific sites. In this case, the subject is Drupal, but the same network of groups could be created around anything. GDO allows users and programmers to organize on a massive scale and drives widespread community involvement in the Drupal project.

The basic principles of Drupal’s success can be applied with technical and non-technical teams in for profit or non-profit organizations. Create a positive feedback loop that automatically rewards individuals for contributing to the project. Break the project into modular components that are owned by an individual or team. Create a platform for collaboration amongst team members.

Drupal is an impressive tool for marketers and community organizers looking to take advantage of the best social media tools. Consider using it on your next project and feel free to contact me with questions about building online communities and collaborative teams.