Last Social Monitoring Breakout

You'll hear me mention that I've put additional notes on line regarding monitoring of social media from the 2010 NAB convention. This is part three, keep scrolling backward for the other two -- all great notes from some very solid folks.

I hope you’re still with me on this long series of extended notes regarding social media monitoring picked up at NAB 2010, because this one has perhaps the most important bit of social media advice. Ron Harlan spoke about monitoring and the effective use of social media, but he led off with this quote. It is what he tells potential clients:

If your product sucks, social media won’t fix it.

If your customer service sucks, social media can help.

Harlan’s point is one lost on a lot of folks in business, and in particular, college athletics. If a team, player or coach is on the ropes, no amount of tweets, Facebook or blog messaging is going to change the fact that something bad has happened or is happening.

Harlan advocates a pretty simple three step strategy:

Rule 1 – listen
Rule 2 – engage
Rule 3 – measure

He provided some of the same links to monitoring that Alexandra had, but he is also a fan of the simple Google Alert.

Much of Harlan’s presentation was about how to create effective tweets. Here’s some of his top items:

Twitter is headlines, and it is all about writing inspiring headlines. “Look at this cool story” and a shortened URL does nothing toward getting retweet – which is the essential part of gaining followers and traffic.

Keep tweets down to 120 characters. If you thought writing in 140 was hard, lopping off 20 more characters sounds difficult but Harlan provides a very important reason – retweet. If you max out, there is no natural space for fans to redistribute your tweets.