Twitter SMS Arrives in India via Airtel.

If you are in India and an Airtel customer, the good news is that you can now send updates to your Twitter account from the mobile phone itself via SMS.

If you are not using an Airtel connection, there’s no reason to worry as the Twitter-Airtel deal is not exclusive and will probably end after a month. Here’s the official word:

"Twitter will be available in India on SMS only on the Airtel network. There is exclusivity for the same for 4 weeks, in which only Airtel consumers will be able to use the service on SMS across the nation. This period of exclusivity is something that we want to take advantage of and make sure that Brand Airtel can own the property Twitter in consumer mind space."

You save money because you don’t have to send an international SMS for using Twitter but the service is still expensive. Twitter doesn’t charge anything for sending updates but you’ll have to pay a buck to Airtel for every tweet that you send from the phone.

To stop getting Twitter updates on your mobile phone, just send OFF, STOP, or QUIT command from your mobile phone to 53000 or use “ON” to start again.

Social media. Measurement

Simply put, Social media refers to all the conversation and engagement that happen on networks and sites like facebook, myspace, twitter, blogspehere, youtube, flickle, messageboard, forums etc...

Since these conversations can have a big impact on your brand it becomes critical for a marketer to understand what people are talking about their brand/products etc. so that they can take appropriate action and help in creating and fostering a positive chatter about their brand.

Broadly, Social media measurement comes in two flavors

1. Measuring the conversation about your brand in Social media

2. Measuring the impact your own social media efforts

In this post i will talk about the first point " Measuring what conversation are happening about your brand".

I will have second post to discuss about second post.

1. Measuring the conversation about your brand in Social media.

Social media measurement is very different from measuring your own web site. You own your own website. You can measure interaction of your visitors with your website.

Social media happens with or without your active participation. It mostly happens outside the realms of your website such as conversation on twitter, blogs, forums, facebook etc.

Since you don't have any web analytics tool installed on these places it is hard to find out what's happening. Even if you had a web analytis tool installed you won't know what people are talking about. which is what you would like to know? This sort of information is not available from traditional web analytics tools like Omniture site Catalysts, WebTrends or Google Analytics.

/ Social Media Analytics Tools.

There are new breed of tools that help you monitor the Social buzz, these tools let you 'listen' into the conversation about your brand.

In these tools you specify a set of keywords that define your brand or are associated with your brand and then the tools do the rest.

They crawl the social media networks/sites and find all the mentions of the specified keywords and bring them back to you in nicely formatted reports.

/ What kind of information do these tools provide?

Most of these tools bring some flavor of the following information:

• Brand Mentions- Conversation about your brand/competitor/ industry (as specified by keyword). You get total mentions by day/week/month and also the ability to drill down a specific conversations.
• Brand Sentiment- What is the consumer sentiment towards your brand? are they positve, negative, neutral on your brand.
• Influencers- Who is talking about you? How influential are they and how many times have they talked about your brand.

Some of the Social media Analytics tools

Radian6

WebTrens. Powered by Radian6

Techrigy - SM2

Omniture. Integration with Twitter

Visible Technoloies

Biz360 Community Insights

Dow Jones Insights

Sentiment Metrics

JD Power web Intelligence

-webanalysis(dot)blogspot