Social media and social networking has spent its first few years as a tool of fun. We connect with friends, we talk about jaunts to the coffee shop, and we do a little verbal jousting. But, now people are getting serious. Fortune 500 companies are seeing opportunity and jumping in and making big splashes. This alone should tell you there is massive opportunity in figuring this stuff out.
Social Media is Fun
Hands down, there are few technologies that have been as fun as social networking…probably since email emerged. That’s no coincidence. We are social creatures. We like to communicate. Chatting and exchanging thoughts and ideas is fun.
The neat thing about social media venues like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube is that we can quickly draw together our community of friends, family, colleagues, and even find new people that share our interests.
Having a community online is not much different than having a great neighborhood. You share, take care of one another, and occasionally get together for a great block party. Social media makes this kind of close connectivity a reality even in an online world.
Social Engagement is Fun
Like I said communicating is a natural need, which makes it fun. However, we are all human. That means we usually have a core selfish motivation–what’s in it for me? That is what begins to excite those looking to social media to make money.
All of those people chatting create valuable threads, trends, perceptions, and attitudes. Marketers, corporate strategists, public relations specialists, and other profiteers want that information.
But, the signal to noise ratio is very poor in most of these channels. The idle chatter makes shifting out value difficult. What’s worse, often the least valuable information has the most volume and frequency–social media spam.
Social Media Monitoring is Profitable
This is why social media monitoring is so valuable. You need to listen. You need to be tuned into this media. However, you must do it with precision that makes you efficient and consistent.
Social media monitoring allows you to listen into multiple channels and aggregate conversations from a variety of social networks. Delivering all of these conversations into one place is half of monitoring social media successfully. The rest of that battle is sorting out the noise. Keywords and RSS are the essential elements to completing monitoring success.
These components allow us to tune into the right phrases that identify the conversations we want to monitor and RSS brings them to our dashboard.
This is what will make your social media strategy profitable.
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