MDraganic

Nowadays students use social media to post everything and anything, from posting pictures of themselves, sharing information about what they’re currently doing, their thoughts and beliefs, the location they are currently at, and the list could go on. The internet is a growing farm with new information added every second of the day and online users have the opportunity to view your content.

As students, we research prospective companies we apply to in order to determine an understanding about their company culture. From this we judge whether or not we could see ourselves working for that particular business. I know from my experience I will search personnel from the business I am applying to and get an understanding of the type of people I will be speaking to during my interview. This is an excellent way to determine if there are any similarities between the interviewer and yourself. The more the interviewer can relate with you, the greater the chance of progressing through the interview process.

Since it is fairly simple to search for company personnel, it is that much easier for these individuals to investigate who we are. Employers will search your name before they even read your resume to obtain a clear view of your digital behavior.  This immediate judgment can literally make or break the possibility of acquiring an interview with any potential employer. The most important rule to follow, if you care about your online reputation, is to think before you post. A simple post complaining about a company can get back to you years down the road, if applying to their company. Why would a company hire an individual who has created a negative assessment about their establishment? Never forget that your online reputation matters since your audience is astronomical.

5 key notes on how to improve your online reputation and digital reach:

1.       Set Your Own Reputation – Create your own personal brand, be strong and positive

2.       Stay On Top of Things – Search your name frequently so there are no surprises for individuals viewing your e-reputation

3.       Ensure There Is More Good Than Bad – Post your own information

4.       Secure Everything – Make sure all accounts are secured and don’t reveal all your information

5.       Educate Family and Friends – Monitor your personal brand on social media and remove unnecessary content

  Sources

Google Alerts – is a BETA service where users receive an email or RSS alert when the search engine catalogueS new material associated to a specific keyword. Google Alerts notifies users when new content from news, web blogs, video, and discussion groups match a set of search terms selected by the user.  For businesses, this would be a good starting point to address customer service issues since you can set up alerts about your company’s name, URL, and key products. When your company is mentioned in a blog Google will send a link and employees can view what is being said and respond to it.

  Price: Free

Sprout Social – social media management monitoring console that integrates with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social networks that are considered as a control centre. A great was to manage your social media no matter where you are.

Price: 30 day free trial $39 per user/month, $59 per user/month, $99 per user/month

Mention – provides media and social monitoring (manage social networks, news sites, forums, blogs, or any web page), anti-noise technology (reduce spam), team work (assign tasks, share alerts), live alerts (real-time alerts via email and push notifications), all devices (access anywhere from webapp’s, pc’s, and mobile app’s), smart action (react to mentions positively, through retweets and sharing), priority mentions (set criteria for most important mentions), and statistics and data expert tools (receive an overview of your mentions by source, language and generate reports to analyze).

Price: Free/ month, $19.99/ month, $99.95/ month

Social Mention – real-time social media search and analysis.  Receive daily email alerts about your company, marketing campaign, competitor, news story, or celebrity.

Price: Free

ViralHeat – an integrated suite for social media monitoring. monitor (social conversation on the web), manage (Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn), analyze (develop insights for ROI from in-depth analytics), engage (interact with your audience over multiple networks from 1 place), influencers (identify advocates for your company, competitors online), leads (recognize your audience and engage them at time of purchase), publish (place rich media content to multiple social networks), sentiment (view and analyze sentiment across different platforms), and reports (view social media reports and understand your ROI).

Price: Free, $9.99/month, $99.99/month

Trackur – provides all social media monitoring tools and measurements in 60 seconds. Social measurement (quickly monitor online reputation, measure social media, and analyze social media mentions about your company, brands, or customers), affordable plans (offers free social media monitoring plans to get you started and then give you the option to upgrade, no contracts), and fully brandable (with the ultimate plan you can white label your social media; your brand, your logo, your colors, and your domain name).

Price: $27/month, $97/month, $197/month, $447/month

Radian 6 – social media monitoring tools, social media engagement software, and social marketing analytics. Social listening (listens to conversations on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, forums, blogs, mainstream news, LinkedIn, image sites, and adding new sources frequently), social content (get your messaging in front of diverse audiences, growing your pool of prospects), engagement (Streamline conversations by bringing all of your social networks into one easy-to-manage dashboard), social ads (reach your desired market with targeted localized campaigns), workflow and automation (automation engine analyzes all posts containing your keywords, and then takes the desired action), and measurement (receive real-time analytics).

Price: $600/month

Sysomos - Social Media Analytics for real-time intelligence to manage products, brands and corporate reputations. Word of Mouth Marketers (engage and identify key influencers to establish and build relationships, and create buzz), Marketers / Advertisers (obtain insight about your target audience, sentiment and geo-demographics), Corporations (contribute to conversations about your products and your brands), and API/Data Partners (contribute to conversations happening within the social media realm about your products and brands)

Price: $500/month

I believe Sysomos would work best for businesses because of its powerful features, functions, and tools. They have received awards for being the best social media monitoring application on the market today.

  Sources

  Chaney, Paul. ``5 Timesaving Social Networking Tools.`` Practical ecommerce Insights for Online Merchants. 19 Oct 2010. Web 9 Apr 2013. <http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/2323-5-Timesaving-Social-Networking-Tools>

Mention. Web. 9 Apr 2013 <https://en.mention.net/>

Roggio, Armando. ``The PeC Review: Google Alerts Helps With Reputation Management. Practical ecommerce Insights for Online Merchants.``  Practical ecommerce: Insights for Online Merchants. 30 Mar 2009. Web 9 Apr 2013. <http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/1033-The-PeC-Review-Google-Alerts-Helps-With-Reputation-Management>

Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Web. 9 Apr 2013. \      <http://www.salesforcemarketingcloud.com/>

Sysomos. Web. 9 Apr 2013 <http://www.sysomos.com/>

Trackur. Web. 9 Apr 2013 <http://www.trackur.com/>

Social media has become so commonplace that it replaced reading the newspaper first thing in the morning. Our lives are intertwined in posting, tweeting, liking, following, pinning, sharing, and the list could go on. With so much more added work in our daily routine, it’s become a part-time (or full-time) job to be apart of various social media platforms. Thanks to social networking sites like Klout, Kred, and PeerIndex, individuals are able to view how they influence their communities through social media analytics. Essentially, these three platforms measure social media influence and reach by tracking daily interactions between individuals and their followers. The difference between Klout, Kred, and PeerIndex is in the algorithms used to determine scores assigned to each user.

  Klout

  Klout measures a user’s influence based on three key activities, true reach (the size of an individual’s audience who actively react to their online messages), amplification (probability of messages generating action through comments, likes, retweets, etc), and network impact (influence value of an individual’s engaged audience). Klout assigns each user a score between 1 and 100, where 100 represents the highest overall influence rating. Scores are based on accumulating data from various social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare, YouTube, Instagram, Tumblr, Blogger, Wordpress, Last.fm, and Flickr. Based on analyzing content that is produced and engaged with, Klout will determine what topics a user is influenced by. Klout also provides the opportunity to boost peer ratings by giving other users a +K. Finally, Klout rewards users by giving away perks from brands based on their influence.

Time: Not time consuming, since you only check your personal score and possible perks.

Cost: Free

Labor: Interacting and posting relevant content on social media platforms.

Kred

  Unlike Klout, Kred is specific to interactions from Facebook and Twitter that measure users by influence (when other users retweet, reply, or comment) and outreach (when users retweet, follow, or reply). Influence is scored on a 1,000 point scale and outreach is based on level system that currently sits at 12. Kred distinguishes itself based on real-time score updates and transparency, that allows users to view a breakdown of which activities contribute to the overall Kred score. Furthermore, Kred is unique by placing users in communities based on what topics users tweet about and how influential they are. Communities receive Kred scores and the most influential user is named “Kred Leader”. By knowing who these influential leaders are, this allows Kred to market to brands. The site provides maps and graphs to provide influence geographically and monitoring progress, respectively. Like Klout, Kred offers the ability to reward peers by sending +Kred.

Time: Not time consuming, since you only check your personal score and possible perks.

Cost: Free

Labor: Interacting and posting relevant content on Twitter and Facebook.

PeerIndex

  Similar to Klout and Kred, PeerIndex measures how influential individuals are in social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Quora. Scores are broken down by authority (how relevant a users recommendations are to their community through engagement), audience (measures the size of a users audience compared to others), and activity (how much a user relates to their topic communities). The advantage of having topics allows users to search for top influencers within categories to determine who has the most authority in a subject. PeerIndex displays a user’s influence in multiple topics via a graph. Like Klout, PeerIndex provides perks for individuals who are active and influential in social media.

Time: Not time consuming, since you only check your personal score and possible perks and rewards.

Cost: Free

Labor: Interacting and posting relevant content on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Measuring Social Influence

  Klout, Kred, and PeerIndex track and measure how individuals interact with their social environments and are good tools to measure social influence. Klout takes into consideration a wide array of social platforms to accumulate the overall score. Kred would be superior if it included more social networks. In my opinion it performs extremely well at measuring how one contributes back to other users, how other users respond to your social contributions, and how it provides a transparent scoring system. PeerIndex is also reasonable, because it considers how much authority you possibly have on certain topics. All three sites are reliable, the only thing that matters is that individuals provide quality content to social media platforms.

  Increasing Klout Score

  My current Klout score is 51. The best way to increase Klout scores would be to post relevant and engaging content that will get your audience interacting. This demonstrates that you are active in providing credible content and the probability of building your network with other high Kred influencer’s increases. Other ways to improve your Klout score would be connecting other social networks to your account, asking questions, providing advice, and posting meaningful articles. Creating spam or “gaming the system” could be accomplished by adding multiple twitter accounts where they interact with your main account in order to accumulate retweets and comments. This would take a large amount of time to boost a Klout score, it would be better to post relevant and engaging content instead.

  Promoting Businesses

  By using these tools, marketers can search for high scoring influences to promote their brand. By enlisting an influencer, they are able to assist in creating awareness about your business. This is excellent because your brand can be quickly searched upon and creates new business with the right influencer spreading your key messages.

   Risks

  Social scores provide a general picture of the influencer towards a massive audience. It would be beneficial to have a target audience that could be more focused towards a company’s marketing objectives. Additionally, marketers have to cautiously monitor what influencers post. Any negative information reaching customers can impact a brands reputation and appropriate action must be conducted to reverse such effects in the social realm.

      Brandweiner, Natalie. “Influencer marketing: Klout vs Kred vs PeerIndex”. MyCustomer 15 Mar 2012. Web. 25 Mar 2013.

< http://www.mycustomer.com/topic/customer-intelligence/influencer-marketing-klout-vs-kred-vs-peerindex/138067>

   Cook, Naill. “Klout, Kred or PeerIndex? It doesn’t matter” Sociagility. 23 Jan 2010. Web. 25 Mar 2013.

If you are looking for an alternate platform, aside from Facebook, to promote your brand (product/service) a great opportunity awaits with Pinterest. Social media is growing quickly each day and Pinterest is a supportive tool to include in your social media strategy. Pinterest is a social media application that allows users to share, organize, and collect remarkable photos or videos. These images or videos are “Pinned” to your board for followers to view, comment, like, and “re-pin”. It is comparable to a corkboard where individuals would pin their notes or images for other family members or colleagues to view.

  Pinterest will benefit your business by providing the opportunity to illustrate your story towards your audience through attractive imagery. Images can vary from products, designs, and various other things to attract visitors. Popular user boards include images of food, fashion, decoration, and any other interests you would showcase to engage your customers. Pinterest has the ability to drive massive amounts of traffic towards your board, ultimately promoting your brand. Pinterest users seem to be highly engaged due to the fact that they spend an abundance of time viewing, searching, and interacting with a variety of material that is pinned by others. By allowing customers to be engaged with your business, a community is created to interact as potential customers. Personalizing your brand on Pinterest creates awareness from customers by “re-pinning” your post, commenting and asking questions, and promoting your brand on other social media sites.

  Search Engine Optimization (SEO) works coherently on Pinterest. With a very good domain authority and its growing social network capabilities, Pinterest provides many opportunities to execute SEO. To enhance search engine optimization you would utilize key words when “pinning” your exceptional images. Visually appealing, high quality photos or videos with unique descriptions are very important for SEO.

  Showcase your story, promote your brand through appealing imagery and unique videos, and establish your audience on Pinterest.

When it comes to learning new platforms there is nothing better than jumping right into it, like assembling a new BBQ without reading the instructions. Unfortunately there are times when we have to revert back to those instructions. We are not perfect, we just like to think we know everything. For those individuals new to Tumblr, like myself, here’s a quick and informative Tumblr “Create + Share + Follow” breakdown:

  Tumblr is a platform (or as related to artists, a type of blank canvas) for creation, both for individuals and corporate brands. Customizing URLs, themes, and color schemes is the starting point for story creation. Story-telling has forever provided people with information, entertainment, and developed awareness. Tumblr allows the story to be broadcasted through the dashboard where both individuals and corporate brands are able to view and engage with the posted content. Every post has space for users to submit tags to make their content discoverable. This initiates people with similar interests to start following each other with the intention of building their very own “follower” group. Anyone who follows an individual is capable of viewing a steady stream of content that user is pushing out. Tagging posts, discovering new blogs, re-blogging and following individuals are the initial steps to building a diverse audience.

  Tumblr is not just another social network, but rather a hub for all things social. It permits individuals to start sharing personal messages for the world to see through links, photos, quotes, and videos to name a few. Adding several types of media (photos, videos, audio, etc.) to a post creates a deeper connection between the story teller and their audience.

  A really fun and engaging way to discover new bloggers is through Tumblr Radar. It serves as a collective consciousness, showcasing some of the best posts on Tumblr to everyone’s dashboard. Radar posts receive millions of impressions, score thousands of notes, and inspire platoons of new followers. Another exciting opportunity to follow new bloggers is through Tumblr Spotlight. Spotlight highlights the top content by showcasing Tumblr’s favourite pages. It is an essential destination for finding blogs to follow since they rack up some of the highest follower counts on Tumblr.

  Tumblr provides analytics to track what is happening through an individuals experience with the platform. A user is able to understand the engagement they are receiving by tracking Radar posts, re-blogs, and likes. Tumblr also permits users to compare their own brands to another’s, to view how their content is performing with respect to its competitors.

  Harnessing and leveraging Tumblr’s features and benefits allows individuals to establish their brand within the realm of social media. This personal brand that is created reaches out to individuals with similar interests, ultimately amplifying their reach in the Tumblr community. Don’t hesitate to provide an opinion or present examples of interests through posts, pictures, or videos. At the end of the day, you are the storyteller and your own personal brand.

  Mark