Finding a Needle in the Social Media Haystack

By Frank Bauch
Without question, this year will continue to deliver dramatic innovation in the high tech industry landscape. From the Apple Tablet to a new army of smart phones, the heart of today’s innovation is the ability to communicate more efficiently and more productively, both for business and pleasure.

The number of conversations occurring about any particular topic is staggering. Recent research shows we are tweeting approximately 27.3 million times per day, equating to nearly one billion tweets every five weeks. A similar number of users are updating their Yahoo! Mail or Messenger status at a record pace. The population of Facebook users is big enough to be the third largest country in the world.

History has shown that people gravitate towards innovation: The development of books eventually necessitated the invention of the library and the Dewey Decimal system to categorize and organize books. The creation of the television was inevitably followed by the remote control, TV Guide, and eventually DVR, to help us keep track of the shows we want to see most.

At Kulesa Faul, we leverage a number of tools to track relevant conversations. TweetDeck helps us track and respond in real time to Twitter discussions. For clients whose conversations are more spread out across the web, filtrbox and other services help to simultaneously monitor information from social networking sites as well as news sites. We also use tools like Meltwater that help modify our searches so that reports about clients like KACE aren’t littered with irrelevant stories like this.

Search engines have become too basic to provide a good understanding of how our clients are being positioned in the public eye. Leveraging social media and web analytic tools is critical to a company’s ability to not only keep tabs on industry conversations, but to help most effectively understand and help shape the conversation in an incredibly dynamic market.
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Thinking about MLK and Everyday Heroes Today…

By Joanna Kulesa

People amaze me. Famous and fearless leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr., Robert F. Kennedy, and everyday heroes like Wesley Autrey, a construction worker and Navy veteran jumping onto the tracks of an oncoming subway train and saving the life of a stranger. Whether fighting for civil rights on the world stage, or acting quickly to preserve a stranger’s life, people are amazing.

I continue to watch in awe the aftermath of the epic earthquake in Haiti; more reminders of people’s capacity for kindness as well as tremendous cruelty. Whether we’re witnessing looters or online scammers looking to profit from others’ generosity, the negative is always outweighed by the human capacity for good, in my view. Neighbor helping neighbor on the ground in Haiti, and whole communities around the world mobilizing to send food, medicine and supplies. The powerful lessons that tragedies offer are astounding.

True, civil rights and human tragedy are not very cheery subjects for a blog from a PR firm. However, it’s hard to write about “the importance of social media,” or how clients “can better get into the business press” when there are so many bigger issues to reflect on this Martin Luther King Day. Today, I can take this time to reflect and donate more to the Red Cross. Tomorrow I'll be back to pitching, promoting, and building clients into name brands. That’s okay, right?

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