I'm very interested in looking at how online PR and social media can benefit clients and I'm currently trying to get a number of them to push the envelope in terms of what they're doing. But sometimes, working as a self employed bod, it can be difficult to find sources of inspiration and more practically, fund some of the more useful social media monitoring/tracking tools (since understandably clients want to see if/how this digital malarky is working for them).
There are some useful free tools out there – measurement camp's wiki has a good list but equally there are interesting tools like Radian 6 that I'd love to have a play around with but at starting price of $600 per month, they're pretty full on. Yes I could pass the cost on to clients but if you're not a huge company with an equally vast marketing budget, that's an awful lot of money to shell out on something that they might not see the benefit of for a good six months. Also, I do wonder how useful some of these tools are in relation to B2B – many of them seem to have big brands in mind. Anyway, hopefully over the next few weeks and months I'll learn more since I'm planning to pick the brains of the lovely people at nixonmcinnes, social media experts that I've made contact with via Twitter.
Do you realise though Katie that (and I don’t know if this is playing the system!) that all you need to do is sign up for a $100/month user account.
Once you are “IN”, all you need to do is create a Topic Profile which lasts 7 days before you have to decide to pay for it or lose it. Once you have run your profile, you can then simply export all the findings (in either graph form or as csv or pdf’s).
Even if you or your client don’t then decide to proceed, or it has served its purposes and they have bought into social media, then let the Topic Profile expire and move on to the next one.
Ah yes Paul, I think you explained this to me after I wrote this post but don’t you need the profile to be ongoing if you want to get meaningful info over a period of time – say 6 – 12 months?