Social Media Policy or the policy that keeps employees within boundaries is much needed for any company who wants to control its social media endeavours.

iridium Interactive has come up with its own Social Media Policy that will aid their clients and their own social media activities. Our intent was to keep it as simple as possible and not confuse our social media representatives with complicated legal jargons. Absorb this and become ready for social media. Also read the social media etiquette blog as it is closely related to this policy.

Iridium’s Social Media Policy Compliance:

Social media is a loose term for widely used social networking platforms like Facebook, twitter, Linkedin, blogs and other public forums. We believe as a business, Social Media can substantially boost our company’s development, performance and services. In our endeavor to utilize the inherent benefits social media has to offer, these are the official guidelines that have to be adhered to while using social media solely for business purposes.

These guidelines apply to those who are actively or indirectly participating and contributing to the company social media activities. Social Media being vast but traceable, it is important that some amount of training will be provided for social media compliance. Dynamic as the social media sphere is these guidelines will also be evolving as new tools surface, keep a continuous track and stay upto date with these changes.

Strict that these guidelines may seem, this is solely for the purpose to participate in a responsible manner while safeguarding our company’s reputation and be in line with the unsaid social media laws.

Guidelines:

• Create a Balance- Yes we are giving you access to the social networks in office like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube. It is your responsibility to make a balance between work and socializing, unless it is for your company. Your work commitments come before your personal online activities.
• Permanancy- Posts, comments, tweets all become permanent once you have published it. Think a lot before publishing any content on behalf of the company.
• Professional Profile- remember to identify yourself as a company employee and the post you hold, this will provide transparency to our company and you, which will be duly noted in the social media ecosystem. This is how you would portray yourself in to your clients and coworkers.
• Although you are representing the company, social media activities involves your own discretion and thoughts. Make this very clear!!
• End Credits: Give credit and source to any information taken from external sites and photographs used. It is important to acknowledge others hard work and borrowing without intimation is like stealing.
• Politically correct: Sensitive topics related to any caste, creed, religion or political group should be avoided.
• Rise Above the Noise: If someone is making rude comments on your blog or other social networks do not engage into a row over the matter. Instead listen to what they have to say and politely respond back.
• Confidentiality- restrain from giving away any confidential information. So take a smart stance and protect your company’s privacy policy.
• Competitors- Do not be harsh about them at any point in any social network . Be politically correct and stick to facts and figures with enough reliable sources.
• Courtesy- Be polite, do not engage in any arguments with any reader. Rude comments to be handled diplomatically.
• Made a mistake- Permanency may be one big disadvantage of social media admitting to a mistake and making the change will improve credibility.
• Second opinions- get the posts checked by your supervisor/employer before publishing.
• Personal Blogs- If you have your own blog and you do mention where you work, mandatory to include a disclaimer stating “Posting on this blog are strictly my own and do not contain/represent iridium Interactive’s opnions.

Image Source: Intersection Consulting from Flickr.

Follow us on @iridiuminter or my personal twitter @sbharatam.

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“We have seen a clear evolution in demands from our customers. They are better informed and far more sophisticated in their expectations and requirements.”- Mark Redgrave of Hapax.

True!! With the advent of social media they now have their own platform to express their views and opinions. The main intention behind social media monitoring is to track these conversations as I have mentioned earlier. Determining if these conversations are positive or negative is called Sentiment Analysis.

Listening to the sentiments behind a customer’s voice is very important for any company that wishes to act upon these opinions. According to me, sentiment analysis is very important to any social media monitoring initiative. It is vital to analyze whether good or bad conversations are driving your brand in the social media space. In fact, tracking sentiments is one of the real reasons why businesses enter social media. At iridium, we use several tools to do this.

Automated sentimental analysis tools are generally used to give numbers to these customer sentiments. It is good if you dig deeper than the statistics to get a clearer picture. Also you will need to compare sentiments across several brands over a time period.

If the consumers have positive sentiments with a brand, its all good, but when there is negative sentiment it makes the analysis interesting when you have to uncover the reasons behind this particular sentiment. Sentiment analysis coupled with social monitoring tools make this study even more interesting. It is more like stepping into your consumer’s mind and understanding what drives their thinking about your company.

I would not like to confuse you further, so I conclude by stating that sentiment analysis is nothing but social media monitoring with a qualitative twist.

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As I would put it, these free tools are good as long as you can wade your way around it and get the output you are looking for from these tools. But if you are lost with these tools, which I know many do in the beginning, then you might have to look into other alternatives.

There are some more shortcomings of these free tools:

Firstly, these tools can be used to assess a campaign or strategic prerequisite, but not for a large amount of data in an all-inclusive Web 2.0 coverage.

Secondly, free tools are just the tip of the iceberg; they do not have the ability to go into the details. They can only introduce you to the listening tools.

Thirdly, machines are great data retrievers but it’s the human touch that makes it into valuable information. This is one big shortcoming of automated, free monitoring tools.

The need of an analyst arises at this point when you have the What, Where, and When answered, but the most critical, Why? and How? are still left to be answered.

Why do consumers think this way about my product? How can I change their perception? An analyst like Iridium can help you draw insights from the data and develop a strategy.

So for all the companies waiting to explore social media, your customers are waiting to hear from you! Begin now to at-least play with the new set of social media monitoring tools. Next, begin taking expertise from social media experts who can take your brand, your voice to the next level. Its not too late…take the first mover advantage!!!

Watch out for more from me as I will take you through a deeper understanding of the Social Listening space…its time to evolve!

Follow us on @iridiuminter or my personal twitter @sbharatam.

You may find the following posts interesting:

• Top 7 Free Social Media Monitoring Tools
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Here are some free Social media monitoring tools that you can use to assess all social media metrics.

1. How Sociable: it is a free tool that defines simplicity. Just punch in the brand you want to measure metrics for and you will get the visibility score for it across 32 social networks. http://www.howsociable.com/

2. Addict-o-matic: This tool provides you with a comprehensive view of discussions on a topic across the most popular social networks. In just one view you can see all the discussions on all popular social networks and blogs. http://addictomatic.com/

3. Technorati- This tool is used to find top blogs and posts on any searched item. http://technorati.com/

4. Google Blogsearch- This is also a blog oriented tool that generates top discussions happening in blogs on a topic you want to search for. http://blogsearch.google.com/

5. Googletrends- Shows the worldwide traffic/searches of this particular keyword. http://google.com/trends

6. Twitterstats-  This is one tool that serves all my twitter purposes. It shows all the relevant twitter stats for the Iridium account and allows comparisons with other accounts too. One stop for all twitter analytics is what this tool is all about. Check it out on http://www.twitterstats.com/

7. Quantcast- This tool is apt for tracking traffic to a particular website and gives Graphical display and demographics wise data segregation. http://www.quantcast.com/

There are numerous free tools available but its your requirements that defines your choice. After my stint in social media monitoring, these are the top 7 tools I frequently use.

Follow us on @iridiuminter or my personal twitter @sbharatam.

You may find the following posts interesting:

• Social Media for your Business is Not a Choice..Its a Need
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In the age of social media, there is a chance that you are regularly trying to spread your message or your client’s message to a huge crowd in a very short time. I have met lots of internet marketers who are working with social media tools but to my surprise I am still confused trying to figure out how to get the most of these social media channels by measuring my ROI effectively.

So after exploring and arriving at some really cool plugins, just thought of sharing some useful Twitter tools where you can measure the results and see for yourself how you are doing in the social media space.

While most of the internet marketing experts recommend using Google Analytics because its free and is a product of Google I do agree with them. It helps you keep a track of web traffic and has advanced analytical features all under one roof.

There are hundreds of free twitter analytical tools available in the web space which measures different statistics of your twitter account, thus confusing you even more, also you wont be able to relate one data with the other. Dont bother with those thousands of tools, frankly it is just a waste of time. Below is a list of 10 twitter related websites, which I think are worth testing and measuring how effective your Twitter campaigns are.

1. TweetStats – I find this a great Twitter app from Damon Cortesi (which just turned two years old) It is basically graphs your Twitter stats including Tweets per hour, per month, Tweet timeline and Reply Statistics. It is a must have tool when you want to impress your client http://tweetstats.com/graphs/tweasier
   
2. TwitterGrader – It’s a useful tool by hubspot.com for analyzing your followers, following, follower history while at the same time showing you a tweet cloud.
3. Twitterholic – This twitter tool specializes by showing you the local twitter users in your area and gives you a ranking. I uses the Geotagging feature of a user’s twitter account at http://twitter.com/settings/account {pic shown below} for displaying the results.
4. TweetVolume – It’s a tool where you can enter a few words and see how many times they appear on twitter. Something like doing a keyword research while doing Search Optimization for a website.
5. Tweetmeme Its a free service which aggregates all the popular links on Twitter to determine which links are popular. You may use this tool as a wordpress plugin allowing the visitors to tweet a post in your blog.
6. TweetValue – I’m not pretty sure about the figures, but this tool shows you how much a particular twitter profile is worth in USD.
7. TwitGraph – Something similar to tweetstats.com, where this tool analyses your twitter profile, measures your tweets and provides you with data in a colourful pie chart format.
8. Twitter Counter – Another tool for displaying your twitter activities with a graphical view. This tool allows you to compare 3 twitter accounts thus providing you a chance to compare between you & your competitors. Also provides twitter widgets, which you can embed within your blog & website.
9. TwitterAnalyzer – This website provides you with a detailed analysis of your account, while at the same time allows you to publish your daily statistics to your followers. These stats may include Readers Reach, RTs Count, Chat Messages Count, Top Friends, Top Retweeters, Top Subject & Followers Growth Rate.
10. Feel Tip Top – TipTop is a Twitter search engine that makes it easy to find advice, opinions and answers from other Internet users. For any topic, TipTop finds what’s useful and interesting, while filtering out what isn’t. It gets you the information you need quickly and easily.

Want to have all the right applications in place for your twitter account rather than opening many browers? Keep reading as I will provide you with all the essential plugins for every twitter account.

Follow us on @iridiuminter.

You may find the following posts interesting:

• Many Twitter How To’s Answered
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