Arment Dietrich SmartTalk eNewsletter

Don't just answer yes to all six questions. What are your goals for achieving each? How will you know your communication/social media program is responsible for success?

Monitor and measure to prove success from your program.

Use Twitter Grader to determine where your Twitter account is right now (most people begin in the 50th percentile) and set goals for increasing that number.
Use popuri.us to quickly check your popularity on bookmark sites (such as Digg or Delicious), the ranking on the search engines, and through number of subscribers.
TwitterAnalyzer gives you analytics for pretty much everything, including tweets, chats, popularity, reach, subjects, friends, mentions, and groups. Use this to benchmark where you are right now and then build metrics from there.
If one of your goals is to increase your connections through new followers each day (without the use of an auto-follow app), then Twitterholic is a great place to start. It crawls your stats for you once a day and charts a growth graph.
Socialmeter scans the major social sites to analyze a Web site's or blog's social popularity. It gives you a score, which becomes your benchmark, and you can set goals to increase it from there.
SiteVOLUME allows you to enter keywords to see how many times they appear on Digg, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube, and Flickr. You enter your keywords against your competition to see where you benchmark against them.
Compete is a great site to analyze your Web site or blog against your competition. It's a great tool to overlay on your Google analytics to determine unique visitors, change in traffic from previous months, search terms used to find you, top referral sites, and it does the same for your competition.
Web site grader is a free SEO tool that measures the marketing effectiveness of your Web site. The site gives you a score, plus a ton of great information on how to increase your percentage.
su.pr: We love this URL shortener because it's much more accurate than bit.ly, plus it shoots your content into StumbleUpon, which helps with your search engine optimization and search engine marketing.

Assess the conversations already happening in both the traditional and new mediums.

What are reporters writing about you, your company, your industry, or your competition? What are your customers or employees saying about you on the social networks?

This is where you listen and begin to assess the tools best to help you achieve your goals.

Go to Twitter search and enter your name, your company name, any of your brand names, even your competitor's names. You can subscribe to the RSS feed so you don't have to do the search every day.
Or, if you'd prefer email alerts, go to TweetBeep, enter the search terms, and set up your account that way.
Part of your listening should always include monitoring blog posts. But sometimes that's not enough. What if someone is writing about you (positive or negative) in a blog's comments? Use BackType to search the comments and to search for specific people who might always try to bring you down. For instance, if "IMAJERK" always comments about you, you can set up BackType to track them.
BoardReader lets you monitor discussion groups and forums. This is great for knowing when a new group or discussion begins about your company. Likewise, if someone were to create an "I Hate Your Company" page or discussion group, you'd know it immediately through BoardReader.
We love Trendrr because it provides pretty, shiny charts and graphs. Trendrr allows you to track and compare the trend of any keyword, including your company, you, or your competition. You can then compare them to other keywords to figure out where the trends are and what you should be including in your communication strategy.
But if you do only one thing, use TweetDeck. This easy-to-download and free desktop application allows you to create searches. So just like you would do with Twitter search, this gives you real-time results right where you tweet. Anytime anyone tweets about anything you search, it automatically aggregates them into columns in TweetDeck.

The last two parts of our program are R and T, which are react/respond and be transparent. This is where we develop strategy and devise programs for you to engage with your audiences using the available technologies (this answers the "what happens when Twitter goes away" question).

As always, feel free to call, email, tweet, Facebook, LinkedIn, or text us with questions.

PR in practice

In the August issue of Franchise Times, Gini writes about social media, what it all means, how to use it to generate business, and the seven habits of highly effective social media. Read more here.

Interested in learning how you can use social media for brand development, thought leadership, business development, talent recruitment, and brand loyalty? Register for a new Webinar series hosted by Gini and Franchise Business Review!