Denver Social Media: Better online marketing through "listening."

Mike Hanbery - 11.9.2010 8:00 AM

This month's Denver Social Marketing Group Meetup focused on listening.

The first phase of a company's social marketing is almost always, as it should be, listening (monitoring) its reputation online. As we often say, "You can't choose whether or not people are talking about you online. You can choose to engage in the conversation about you."

Social listening is a necessary "defensive" tool, but businesses of all sizes are using it for "offensive" purposes, as well. Tapping into conversations can provide insight to opportunities and trends within your industry and about your competitors and can even reveal potential customers.

So how to go about it? Some of the tools discussed at the Meetup were:

• Google Alerts, Google Reader, customized Google home pages
• Social Mention
• Search Monitor
• Twitter Search (and the Twitter search functionality within TweetDeck and HootSuite)
• Replyz
• Cision
• PR Newswire
• Radian6
• ExactTarget
• Nutshell Mail

(Disclosure: Webolutions is a reseller of Radian6 and ExactTarget and houses a Certified HootSuite Professional.)

Are you using any of these tools? Have you left one for another? Are they doing all you want them to do? Let us hear from you!

The Denver Social Marketing Group meets on the third Friday of each month at Chez Cirque Dueling Pianos. We enjoy Luna Roasters coffee, delicious Duffeyrolls and fresh fruit from SmartCo Foods, interactive presentations and relaxed professional networking. We host the event with our friends from Denver Dataman and the South Metro Denver Chamber of Commerce.

We're taking November off but we'll return December 10. We hope you'll join us.

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