Activities

Activities refer to the different tasks needed to execute social media marketing initiatives. Since there is such a large amount of real time data constantly being created, there are three main activities that you need to be successful:

•  Monitoring to track, synthesize and aggregate the online data streams into usable information.  Effective Monitoring requires a strategy to determine what to monitor, a technology to capture mentions, and resources to evaluate  which conversations are relevant.
• Contribution to the conversation so that your organization’s message is heard within the online community.
• Measurement to quantitatively gauge the results of your campaigns so that you can continuously iterate and improve.

Examples

Monitoring:

• Track mentions of your company, products, industry or competitors
• Track your SEO / SEM keywords for mentions
• Follow lists of topics on Twitter that interest you and apply to your product / brand / industry

Contribution:

• Add comments to industry blogs
• Add your own blog entries
• Tweet or Retweet on Twitter
• Add videos to YouTube or Vimeo
• Run a series of “investigative” reports on CNN iReport
• Run contests on Facebook
• Kickoff a Foursquare promotion

Measurement:

• Set goals in your analytics package and track them
• Benchmark Google results for specific terms that are brand identifiable to you
• Measure brand sentiment in your monitoring tools