Monday, November 7, 2011

Do we need to talk?

I keep reading blogs and articles about how social media can destroy enterprises. Well, to be truthful – I don’t work in an enterprise. Did, twice – but I didn’t like it so much (but learned a great deal, and loved the people I worked with).
But at my current title - I really need to know if you’re writing about my startup. But not just about it – about anything that might be relevant. For instance – if you’re writing a blog on MySQL scalability – I probably want to talk to you.
I’ve used this blog to bitch about the tools I’ve used. But this, by far, is the biggest challenge I have. I wasn’t happy with any PR agency auto responder. Doing it myself is better, but timezone differences and out-of-internet access zones (United – will you please have internet on planes already?) make this undependable.
But first thing first. To track what people are writing about my company and the topics we care about I use Google Alerts and Twitter Search (my current tool of choice is MetroTwit – whose main value is that isn’t developed in Adobe AIR, so it doesn’t kill my windows machine).
Google alerts let me configure auto running search terms, and get the new results to my email box. So far, it has proven very effective, and usually I’m the first to comment on blogs that interest me. It offers multiple level of configuration, but I rather get some results twice, and not wait till the end of the day to get interesting links.
I use twitter for the same result. Twitter searches are very useful, and people are sharing allot of data in their twitter feeds. So when anyone writes about my company – I make sure to retweet him, and follow him, from both my personal account and from the company account. When someone writes about a relevant topic – I follow him from both accounts, and answer his tweet. I try not to be pushy, because I feel it’s rude to talk to someone I don’t know – but hey, it’s my company, and my kids future ;-)
So I’ve built a nice system, but it takes huge amounts of time, and it is not scalable. I’m still researching for new tools and service providers that can help me. If you have any idea/experience – please share in the comments section.

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