From the monthly archives:

February 2009

Despite being in possession of a ticket to London’s Global charity event Twestival; standing outside in the freezing wind and snow waiting to get into the venue in Shoreditch was unavoidable.  Looking back it showed true dedication on my behalf to the fastest growing social media phenomenon: Twitter.

With an annual growth rate of 813%, Twitter has well and truly surpassed the all important tipping point and is now ranked as the world’s third largest social network (even if it is technically defined as micro-blogging) behind Facebook and Myspace.

The Twestival event primarily was for the charity ‘water‘, however for me it was all about getting together and blurring the boundaries between online and offline communications by being able to meet the real faces behind the computer generated avatars.

I actually had some time away from the Twitter interface and did not tweet once during my time at Twestival.  I was too busy communicating in person with new acquaintances and friends.  Consistent with my Twitter behaviour I was hopping around from person-to-person getting involved in the conversation that was somewhat less formal than my Twitter conversations about social media and other musings.  This was true offline social networking.

The Guardian featured the event and if you check out the photo that accompanied the article below, you will see my face featured in the bottom right hand corner.
 

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The WhosTalkin social media search engine has to be one of the most useful online tools around that is free to use.  I’ve used socialmention, backtype, google alerts, technorati, blogpulse and all the other usual suspects, but WhosTalkin pulls all these together and delivers quick and easy results for tracking online buzz within the social media space.  

If you need to pull together a top line report on social media talk-ability around your brand then this social search engine will help you to achieve that task.  
It will pull results from Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, forums, communities and blogs.  The only downside is that you have to manually filter through each category to search the results. 

Alternatively if you are a larger brand looking to track sentiment, compare buzz trends against competitors and compile the data into a report automatically, then the most cost-effective option is the paid for route with data monitoring providers such as Radian 6, Nielsen BuzzMetrics and BrandWatch.

The majority of us who have our own websites and blogs looking to track social media mentions can use this tool alongside Google Analytics to provide a good overview of our brand’s social media performance.

If you liked this blog post, copy, paste then tweet it:
RT @TomChapman: WhosTalkin about your brand in social media? http://bit.ly/vjQz

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