Marketing.fm – Eric Friedman

I was recently reminded of a survey I created at SocialToo.com which is a service I use to track followers\unfollowers on Twitter as well as do short surveys that live on the web. I noticed someone responded and reshared this survey thus prolonging its life further into the black hole that is the Internet.

It turns out that it has gotten over 1K+ responses (last time I checked it was less than 100)

This made me realize that there are tons of services and pieces of content I have touched or created that continue to live on well beyond their expected lifecycle – all because of the social web.

Someone who stumbles upon a survey can re-tweet, email, share, etc… something and get it back into the flow of attention and shed new light on something that may have faded for weeks\months\years.

This brings me to the importance of data collection and analytics.

Keeping activity in the attention stream of your analytics review keep you aware of the life of your content. That is why I use services like SocialToo, Twitter Search,Bit.ly, Google Analytics, FriendFeed, and SiteMeter, to monitor the ebb and flow of what is getting some attention.

Brands tend to look at this same problem through the filter of Business Intelligence, which is essentially a complex and complicated way of talking about tracking all the conversations, comments, posts, praises, complaints, KPI goals, and media tracking that could have anything to do with a brand.

There are a ton of tools that exist to help you do this, some of the free ones I have listed above, but the Social part of the web means that content you have long since forgotten about can resurface in an instant.

The importance of having a system in place to help you track this business intelligence (or in my case personal brand intelligence) is paramount. Deciding on the right tools to have in your interactive analytics toolbox is important.

Finally, as always, how to interact, and re-interact with all this data is the most important piece of collecting all this consumer\customer\potential customer interaction in the first place.

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