Lauren Vargas
Community Manager at Radian6
@VargasL

We need to move away from the presentations of 2 years ago where every SM agency showed a crazy picture of a map of social networks (that looked like it had been prepared by Industrial Light and Magic as an image of a galaxy far, far away) and said ‘this is where the conversations about your brand are happening; where are you?’. Scare tactics like that just confuse, and lead to the lack of direction from brands that you mention. Far better, as you suggest, to do a very small number well. Also better to ‘own your own’, as I did at CFS with the goodwithmoney blog. This isn’t a case of taking people away from familiar territory, rather, providing them with an arena where they can talk and be heard by the brand.

Monitoring conversations – where brands ‘earwig and jump in’ – I’ve only ever heard positive feedback from this, assuming it’s done sensitively. “I mentioned this on my blog and XXX got in touch and sorted it out”. One can’t maintain a full, active presence on every network; trying just results in a brand chasing each and every network as it pops up. Plus it’s simply not appropriate – why should Brand X be maintaining a real presence on Mumsnet, for instance? It would look a bit weird and creepy for a brand to be chatting away on there, just in case a conversation about them popped up. (And fora like Mumsnet *are* social networks; it’s not just Facebook et al.)

Ultimately, of course, all of this is pointless without the flexibility of a brand to adapt and respond *fundamentally* to the feedback they’re getting. Complaints on social networks come when something goes wrong, or when a complaint isn’t dealt with properly (United breaks guitars, etc), or when a customer feels like they’re not being listened to through the usual channels. That’s the real message which brands need to absorb, adapt and therefore take advantage of. No-one would worry about 60+ social networks having conversations about how great they are, after all.

And I apologise for the extravagant use of Latin in this response. I just like the word ‘fora’…;)

If this doesn’t make me sound too much like a stalker, i’ve long know who you are! I’ve been on Seesmic ever since it was in private alpha. It’s been interesting to watch the brand evolve into what it has become now!

As for the solution, I couldn’t agree more. As you are probably well aware, things like Radian6, Techrigy allow us to monitor conversations (from a brand point of view), but responding in real time is very limited. Things like cotweet are good starters, but that is just for Twitter, so only partially effective.

Assuming (as I think will become inevitable) that more social networks will be breaking their functionality up into more consumable chunks (I guess Facebook is the key one at the moment), there should be no reason why a dashboard containing both inbound mentions and outbound publication such as you describe shouldn’t be possible – a one stop shop for brands to monitor and respond to, their social channels.

Best of luck with the development!

While I agree with you on the problem, we are also working on the solution which is to aggregate in one single screen all the feedback the brands will get from all the social networks.

Ping is great, Seesmic is already building pong In Seesmic Desktop you can already get feedback from both Twitter and Facebook at the same place and we will aggregate the feedback from all social software progressively, we want to help brands and individuals also manage the feedback so that they can interact, which I agree, is the most important.