Monitors are made up of many search pieces, including Twitter, blog, and news searches, as well as RSS feeds.

Google Alerts are the easiest way to be notified when new content on a topic of your choice pops up on the Internet. The power of Google search, combined with some customizations and a delivery method of your choosing, make it ideal.

What does that mean for TodayLaunch users? You can integrate these Google Alerts into your TodayLaunch monitors to increase your brand and industry monitoring abilities.

Each TodayLaunch monitor is like a puzzle, made up of search pieces that include Twitter, Google Blog Search, Google News, and RSS feeds. We’ll set up our Google Alert and bring it into TodayLaunch through the RSS feed option. You’ll want to add this additional level of monitoring because Google Alerts function slightly different than a regular Google search. It collects the top search returns with recently published content, and tries to prioritize relevant search returns. This adds the general web, video, and discussion groups to your TodayLaunch monitoring capabilities.

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TripAdvisor is growing in popularity and in reviews. For businesses in the travel or restaurant industry, it can’t be ignored.

Tracking reviews is an elusive sport. Really, when it comes to social media, everything is a review, a vote of support. But there are those kinds of reviews, and then there are the Reviews, the ones where your business is getting judged on a scale.

TripAdvisor, Yelp, Google+ Pages/Places, Yahoo Places, Foursquare, Urbanspoon — these are just a few of the most popular services customers use to make a review. TripAdvisor alone had managed to accumulate more than 45 million reviews at a rate of about 23 reviews each minute by mid-2011. That’s a lot of people talking about the over-cooked pasta or fluffy hotel pillows.

It's like obituaries, when you die they finally give you good reviews. -- Roger MarisClick To Tweet

A Review Of Brand Monitoring

You’re a business owner. You know you need to hear what customers are saying about your business. But how to do it? First off, if you haven’t staked your claim on these sites, stop reading now. Do that first. We tell you how to do that here.

If you’ve been with us for even a few weeks, you’ve already done some important steps in setting up TodayLaunch to help you monitor customer feedback:

1. You learned how to respond to negative feedback. (Learn it here.)
2. You mastered the basics of setting up a monitoring system for Twitter, Facebook, and general online feedback. (Learn it here.)
3. You beefed up your Twitter search settings and aren’t missing a thing your customers are saying there, either. (Learn it here.)

Next up?

TripAdvisor, that 45 million-review behemoth. If your business is in the food, hotel, or travel industry, you’ll want to monitor TripAdvisor. Happily, this particular site allows you to grab an RSS feed of reviews left on your specific business listing page. This makes it super easy to monitor.

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Let TodayLaunch do your work for you, with the new queue feature.

What Is The Queue?

TodayLaunch’s queue feature helps make your workload lighter while maintaining a constant social media presence.

It allows you to reduce some of your decision-making process just to what content you want to share on your social networks, relieving you of the time it takes to hard-schedule it and decide when it should run. Find it, queue it, forget it.

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Twitter gives us the tools to make our searches specific (and useful).

Monitoring Twitter for mentions of our brand is just one way to keep tabs on what people are saying on Twitter. People talk about or to us indirectly, too, in other ways than using @OurBrandName. How do we find these other mentions of our brand? Generic too-broad searches won’t work; we can’t (and won’t) spend the time to sift through it all each day. Luckily, Twitter gives us the tools to be very specific about our searches on its network.

For example, you might want to set up a search that takes into account:

1. Key People. These are the Twitter users that are important to the industry or topic at hand. Rather than our entire Twitter feed of all followers, we can specify those we want to monitor.
2. Brand Sentiment. Are customers saying positive or negative things about our brand on Twitter? There are several ways we can track that.
3. Competitor Conversation. Find out what people are saying to our competitors on Twitter. We might learn something, and we might find the opportunity to connect with people who are dissatisfied with our competitor’s service or product.
4. Product Names. Monitoring mentions of specific products or services is important to any brand with such offerings.
5. Geographic Location. Twitter allows us to find Tweets sent in a defined geographic location. For example, if someone Tweets and wonders where a good pizza place is, we could respond if we are nearby (and selling pizza, of course).

Setting Up Your Twitter Monitor

Twitter provides a listing of their search operators. These operators let us refine our searches and return specific results.

Using TodayLaunch, we can set up monitors based on a topic or category, and fill it with as whatever number of searches are needed to flesh out the monitor. As with any monitor, we’ll give it a relevant name that tells us what kind of search results we can expect to find in it.

Give the TodayLaunch monitor a useful name.

Next, we decide what we are looking for, i.e. what kind of searches we’re going to use.

In the example below (from:RealCapnCrunch), we only want to return the Tweets written by the specific Twitter user RealCapnCrunch. If we’d used @RealCapnCrunch, we’d have returned Tweets said about or too the user instead.

We’re going to add any tweets from the user “RealCapnCrunch” – anything they say, we’ll have in our monitor.

Setting up a TodayLaunch monitor with several from:TwitterUser searches mimics the creation of a Twitter list. We create a topic-specific group where we easily follow the Tweets they publish. This makes it easy to share and Retweet relevant content.

This monitor will return all the Tweets of these Cereal Movers and Shakers.

Remember, our monitor is based on a topic, so we might include several different kinds of searches in one monitor. For example, a monitor for complete tracking of our brand might include:

• mybrand :)
• mybrand :(
• #mybrand
• @mybrandTwitterName
• to:mybrandTwitterName

It’s time for an easy way to find and share great content with your fans and customers.

Our audience wants to hear someone else sing a song once in a while.

It’s true.

They bought tickets to hear us, sure, but an opening band and intermission sounds pretty good after a while.

We’ve already learned how to monitor our brand, and we know our blog and our social media should contain a great mix of content. Now we have to learn to share the spotlight by sharing the content of others.

How Do I Find Content To Share?

We can find content in three ways:

1. RSS feeds
2. Online searches
3. Social Media

RSS Feeds

RSS feeds are syndicated content from websites and blogs. We can use a feed reader to categorize different feeds to make it easy to organize large amounts of related content. RSS feeds are the best way to get consistent content, since we are vetting which sites we want to gather feeds from and make sure the quality is high.

Online Searches

Online searches are how we find content, including breaking news, broad swaths based on a topic, and even those blogs and sites we eventually grab an RSS feed from. These also include things like Google Alerts, an automated way to perform a broad online search on a regular basis.

Social Media

Within social media, we find content. On Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ we have already built a steady supply of content in our news feeds and streams based on people and subjects that interest us. We discover content that they have shared with us.

Giving can be the quickest and most honest way to attract the world’s attention. — Russell Simmons quotes

How Do I Share It?

It’s easy enough to share content that’s in our news feed or stream on a social network, but most of us are using social media management tools, like TodayLaunch, and so we don’t always interact with the networks in a way that allows us to do that. Where does that leave us?

• We can visit every social network multiple times a day.
• We can have our inbox flooded with countless Google alerts.
• We can spend hours performing online searches and sifting through the results for content.
• We can slog through our RSS reader, and manually copy and paste content into each social network.

That’s going to take some work. There is a better option:

• We can use the same multiple-network social media dashboard we’ve been using for conversation and brand monitoring to find content to share. Easily.

Using TodayLaunch, we can set up multiple RSS feeds, online searches, and Social Media sources all under one category for easy previewing and quick sharing. We can make as many of these categories as we need.

Set up your categories and give them a name that will be useful for you.

We are probably already following great people on Twitter — adding them to our TodayLaunch content sources makes sense.

Find people on Twitter that fit the category you’re building. You’ll be able to RT their tweets easily.

Find the RSS feeds on the blogs we read. We may already have a collection in a reader, so grabbing those feed URLs and bringing them into TodayLaunch will be easy.

Make sure to use a correct RSS feed URL in order for the content to be collected and display properly.

Think of the terms we’d use for an online search to find content, or how we set up Google alerts (if we’re currently using them). TodayLaunch automatically adds the quotes around the search terms, so we simply need to type in the search, choosing whether we’ll search blogs or news.

We can set up a custom online search and set the content up to be easily previewed and shared.

Once set up, we have a full selection of categorized content to choose from. TodayLaunch lets us preview the content, and even open it if necessary, before we decide to share it.

Our searches and feeds can be read and shared quickly and in one place.

And that’s it! We can add as many of these kinds of searches or feeds as we need based on the category, and as many categories as we want, all with the option to refine later by deleting those terms and feeds we decide we don’t want.

From one place, we can take part in conversation, monitor our brand, and find and share content.

Why Share Content?

The foundation of trust is sharing.

For our customer, that means sharing our own content, but also high quality content from other sources. It tells them we’re in it for them. It tells them we’ll do the work and take the time to sift through lots of content to bring them the best information. They learn to trust us.

Finding the best content and sharing it shouldn’t have to take all day. Using a tools like TodayLaunch helps us be successful without being bogged down. We can build our audience with ease from one social media dashboard.

Attaining Inbox Zero in your social media is an important part of your social marketing success.

Inbox Zero means keeping our inbox under control, and it is usually reserved for our email. But social media is about conversation too, and so Inbox Zero definitely applies. Direct messages, replies, conversations, and questions from our fans and customers coming from all directions is more challenging to keep tabs on than our one email inbox.

If ever there was a place where Inbox Zero was needed, it was in social media management.

Why Inbox Zero?

Inbox Zero means we respond and can move on. We get things done and don’t backpedal. We make ourselves to do the work now and not put it off until later, when we’re under a time crunch. It shows up in our inbox, but it doesn’t stay.

Social media is a lot like email, and managing it should be as easy as using an inbox.

Inbox Zero in social media helps us:

1. Maintain Focus. Whichever social media tools we use, it is important to keep track of what conversation we’ve responded to and what we haven’t. While we don’t want to “delete” a conversation, it would be helpful to archive it, much like Gmail allows us to remove email from our inbox without deleting.
2. Avoid Feeling Trapped. We use checklists in daily life because they allow us to mark something finished and continue on to the next task. With social media software, we don’t want to feel like we’re trapped in it. We don’t want to constantly wonder if there is something that remains to be processed or that we forgot to do, spending our time in the software trying to make sure everything was done.
3. Accomplish Goals. Completed projects bring about a sense of accomplishment. When we arrive at an inbox that always appears full, it feels like we haven’t done anything. There is no measurement of our work.

These principles are the same whether it is for email or our social media accounts.

Get Inbox Zero For Social Media Management

Using a tool like TodayLaunch allows us to accomplish those three core principles of Inbox Zero with our social media management.

With TodayLaunch, you can read, respond, and archive from one easy interface.

Using TodayLaunch with these principles of Inbox Zero in your social media management means three things will happen:

1. Know What’s New. At a glance, you will be able to see if you have new conversations or messages coming in. When you can see what’s new, you can respond faster.
2. Do Your Work. It will be clear what needs to be done. Easy things get done, so work made easy is work that gets finished. When the work is finished, being able to archive it and visually say “done!” is essential.
3. Move On. You came, you saw, you conquered. Time to move on. The work is done, archived and you can move onto the next task in your workflow confidently.

When using TodayLaunch, we have the reassurance that if there is any additional activity surrounding an archived message, it will reappear in our inbox to respond to again if necessary. We don’t have to keep it around just in case there’s new activity.

Too many available social media tools replace necessary Inbox Zero principles with overwhelming extras, unnecessary features, and visually distracting feeds that don’t allow us to archive and feel that sense of completion. Instead, they encourage us to stay in the software and constantly watch for and sift through information. We aren’t encouraged to complete tasks and continue with our regular workflow outside of social media.

TodayLaunch allows you to batch process and archive messages, making Inbox Zero easily within reach.

Whatever social media tool we choose to use for our social media management, it should be one that doesn’t trap us within the software with an overload of information, and instead gives us the freedom to respond, archive, and move on.

Before the prevalence of the Internet, businesses didn’t always know what their customers thought of them unless they used focus groups or a drop in sales. Now, our customers are rushing online, and are telling everyone what they think of our business, good or bad. Everything we need to know about how our customers view us is available. We just need to find it, read it, and respond.

A few praises or a complaints could just as easily turn to future praise or to future fury, depending upon how we handle it. Do our customers love us or hate us? Do they have suggestions?

Brand monitoring is where those questions are answered.

Monitoring your brand online is necessary in a social media world.

Why You Need To Monitor

Monitoring a brand shows us several things:

1. Where we’re doing a good job.
2. Where we need to improve.
3. Who our audience and customer base is.
4. What our customers need and want.
5. Where we need some damage control.

Knowing these things helps us build and protect our brand’s reputation.

Who Should Monitor

If we’re open for business, the best time to start monitoring is now. And, since it is our brand, we’re the most qualified to do it. It might be tempting to outsource brand monitoring, but there is value to doing it ourselves. That first-hand interaction with customers gives us a clear picture of where change needs to happen. And, most importantly, the voice our customers hear responding to them is authentic.

What To Monitor

There are no shortage of places where conversation is happening online, but having a presence on Twitter and Facebook is a must since much discussion happens on these two social networks. We should also watch our blogs and do regular online searches to see what customers are saying elsewhere. When performing a search on a social network or online, we should watch for mentions of our brand, our products, and our services. Any mention is worth looking into, even if only to respond back with a “thanks for mentioning us!”.

How To Monitor Your Brand

Monitoring is about responding. Whether it’s a direct question, a complaint, or praise, a response is necessary. An ugly situation can be redeemed just be responding and letting our customers know we’re real people who care.

Every extra Facebook or Twitter account, and every new Internet search, adds another level of complexity to the monitoring process. Finding a way to stay on top of it all is necessary. There are several tools available online that can help us simplify this process. Using TodayLaunch as that tool, we’ll learn that monitoring doesn’t have to be difficult.

Monitoring On Twitter

To track mentions of our brand on Twitter, we want to pay attention to the #hashtags and @ replies and mentions.

For each of our Twitter accounts, we need to pay specific attention to each @MyAccount  mention, since that will include both direct communication (replies) and mentions specifically directed to us. When customers use these, they are definitely expecting a response from us.

People use #hashtags before keywords and phrases to categorize their Tweets, and make them easily searchable by other users. We want to know of any mentions of our brand that use hashtags. We might also later watch for hashtags if we realize our customers are using some that we hadn’t thought of, or if our brand is part of a trending topic that has a specific hashtag.

In TodayLaunch, we can set up all of our multiple Twitter accounts as well as these specific #hashtags and @replies so that we don’t miss any mention on the Twitter network.

Monitor Twitter combinations for all of your products and services, as well as your main brand.

Monitoring On Facebook

Conversation on Facebook happens a bit more like a traditional blog comments section.

Fans can indicate that they like a post or the comment of another fan, or they can jump into the conversation and share a variety of content. We need to get involved in the conversations we start as well as those our fans start. They might mention us in a positive or negative way in their own account, where all of their friends can see, and we might not always have access to that. Responding to any mention we have access to is very important, and keeping conversation alive on our own page where we always have access is a good way to do that.

Watch for new Facebook fan activity, and be sure to reply.

Many brands have multiple Facebook Pages to manage. Within one brand, different products, branches, or services are often given their own Facebook Page. Facebook lets you jump between pages we’re administrator of in order to manage each page separately. Using a tool like TodayLaunch, though, makes it easy to manage all of them from one location.

Monitoring multiple Facebook pages is easier if done from one location.

Facebook also offers users the ability to search their site, and specify where the search should take place. While we can’t find out what people say about our brand if it’s hidden behind privacy settings, anything that fits our search that is public will come up. Simply enter your search term, select where the search should happen, and then see the results.

Facebook allows you to search publicly available content on the network.

Monitoring With Online Searches

Google Alerts are a great way to keep tabs on any mention of our brand online. Some conversations aren’t happening on traditional social networks. They’re happening on blogs, websites, and in news stories.

We’ll want to set up a search on the obvious things, such as our brand name and product names. We might also want to consider derivatives, or ways customers refer to our brand or products. Google Alerts let us set these searches, and then specify how and when we want the results to arrive. They can be sent to our inbox, or can be sent to an RSS reader. Keep in mind that each search is a new Google Alert, with its own separate email or feed to manage.

Using a tool like TodayLaunch lets us keep this broad-search monitoring in the same place as our other methods, avoids multiple emails for every search term, and offers repeated updates through the day.

Making regular internet searches on our brand is important.

 Monitor On Your Blog

It goes without saying (hopefully) that we need to respond to comments on our blog in most situations. Customers often turn to blogs for support or complaints because they don’t know where else to go. A busy blog comment section can be difficult to stay on top of, so using the blogging software to alert us to each new comment is a must. Tools like TodayLaunch will integrate the ability to monitor WordPress blogs within the same interface.

Responding in our blog comments section is a top priority.

Having a system and plan in place to learn what people are saying about our brand online is wise, and finding the best tools to help us accomplish this task easily means we’ll do a better job of it.