Integrated Branding Blog | Movéo

3 social media marketing tools that track your brand

As a company, it's important to know what others are saying about your brand. Thankfully, there are tools to help us keep track of what is being said and who is saying it. Here are three tools to help discover these online conversations:

socialmention
This site allows you to create alerts, just like Google Alerts. You'll receive e-mails of the latest mentions of your company on blogs, bookmarks, comments, images, events, news, videos, audio and Q&A.

TweetDeck
Download TweetDeck and you can keep track and organize conversation on Twitter and Facebook that involve your brand. You can also save searches and see who is replying to your Tweets. Best of all, it's all in one window that you can customize.

Keotag
Search for tags that mention your brand (or any keyword). It's simple to use - just type in the keyword you'd like to search and then click on the engine you'd like to search through. There are a number of engines available including Technorati, del.icio.us, MSN, Digg, Reddit, Yahoo! and YouTube.

Know of any others? Feel free to mention them in the comments.

Blogging and Corporate Culture

Corporate blogging is still fairly rare, with only a few big companies choosing to blog. When Movéo Integrated Blog began we realized that this was not just something we wanted to be Bob and Brian’s responsibility. For many companies blogging seems like something that only upper management should be involved in. Movéo began this way, opening up the blog to department managers. The plan has always been to slowly open up the blog to a larger number of employees.
While limiting the blog initially to department managers, those managers soon found that either they weren’t familiar with the technology or they didn’t have the time to write. So they asked their employees to either write the posts, and have them proof them, or they wrote them and asked someone to enter them into the blog.
Employees who normally don’t interact with clients started getting excited, the blog means recognition publicly of their expertise. Soon employees were communicating more across departments talking about what someone posted on the blog.
When a corporate blog is opened up to employees it benefits the business in more ways than just taking the load off of management to produce content. The corporate culture is given a boost.

What is Web 2.0?

The big trend on the Internet in the last few years is web 2.0. The first year that I kept hearing the term I was working extensively with internet marketers who seemed to be seeping onto the internet from the late night cable infomercials. They all kept saying it was the best thing to happen for solopreneurs and small businesses looking to reach beyond where they were willing to travel. After a few conversations with some of the people who defined what web 2.0 really is I finally got it.

Here is what the essence of Web 2.0 is NOT:
(despite what you may have been told)

1. Rounded corners
2. Skype Blue
3. Lots of navigation options
4. A RSS feed button
5. Having a Blog

Here is what the essence of Web 2.0 IS:

1. Social Networking
a. MySpace
b. YouTube
c. Facebook
d. Forums

2. Business Networking
a. Linkedin
b. Meetup
c. Industry specific Forums
3. Engaged communication providing value and illustrating expertise.
4. Navigation that makes sense and works well.
5. A commitment to actively participate to expand on the shared knowledge base (social network theory).

So why should B2B marketing pay attention to what Web 2.0 brings to the internet?
Web 2.0 allows a business to show off the talent of their employees or owners. Web 2.0 is not something that can be outsourced, the writer must have the knowledge and insight being. I have seen these tasks outsourced before, and every step of outsourcing lost a high degree of the companies brand strength.