Engaging Your Chapters with Social Media: Resources

In my recent presentation "Engaging Your Chapters with Social Media" at the ASAE Annual Meeting (with co-presenter Peggy Hoffman), we mentioned several resources we found to be useful for listening and monitoring online conversations about your organization or industry. I decided to share several of these resources here. Please note that I haven't included information on paid online community sites as that topic lends itself to a blog post all its own (NFi, HigherLogic, Socious, ...etc...). If you have questions about these sites or if you know of some new sites that are even better, please comment here.

The two basic social media alerts you need to have now!

Google Alerts
Examples of things to monitor:

• Mentions of your Society

• Mentions of your competitor
• Industry keywords

Google alerts

Google Alerts are emails automatically sent to you when there are new Google results for your search terms. You can also choose to have your alerts delivered via feed to the feedreader of your choice (e.g., Google Reader or add the feed to your iGoogle page). They currently offer alerts with results from News, Web, Blogs, Video and Groups.

SocialOomph.com (formerly known as "TweetLater")
Examples of things to monitor:

• Mentions of your Society

• Mentions of your competitor
• Industry keywords

SocialOomph
SocialOomph can be used to set up alerts and track keywords in the public Twitter stream. SocialOomph monitors the Twitter tweet stream and periodically emails you a digest of the tweets that contain those keywords. You can also use this to track your @replies.

Another great thing you can get from SocialOomph is the Twitter aliases who are commenting on your topic area or Society.

For example, some of the people who post information you put out are not your members...

1. You can get new members this way

2. You can identify current very vocal members this way

3. You can also view these sources as outlets for your news...how many followers do they have?

Transparency is the expectation.

Some examples of free groupsites you can use to start member communities:

Groupsites.com (formerly known as "CollectiveX") http://www.groupsite.com/

Ning http://www.ning.com/

Drupal http://drupal.org/

Great sites for managing multiple Twitter accounts:

HootSuite: http://hootsuite.com/ **Note: I really enjoy HootSuite for its ability to track link clicks when using its link shortener which is built in and doesn't require visiting another site!

TweetDeck: http://tweetdeck.com/beta/ **Note: I like the way TweetDeck is formatted and its iPhone app works well for tracking various hashtags and groups!

Splitweet: http://splitweet.com/

Other helpful links:

Twellow: http://www.twellow.com/ **Note: This particular link will be very helpful to you if you are trying to build up your list of people to follow (listen to) for your association. You can identify Twitter users who follow or show interest in your association topics/industry.

Polldaddy: http://www.polldaddy.com/

KnowEm UserName Check: http://knowem.com/


These are just several of the helpful resources you can use to help manage your online social media engagement with members. I have my favorites, but I've included some second and third favorites here since tastes can vary. Do you have some that you think should be added to this list? Essentials you can't live without for your monitoring and engagement practices?