Yesterday June 4th was the first meeting of the Social Media Monitoring Meet-Up Group and it was a blast. It started with dining and drinks that were provided by Meltwater at their San Francisco headquarters. Meltwater went above and beyond the call of duty and brought filling hors d’oeuvres and fruit. The salami was particularly scrumptious, as were the assorted cheeses and variety of crackers. The beer and wine made people forget it was Monday!
After the meet and greet, I led a short panel with Kimling Lam of Meltwater and Chase McMichael of Infinigraph. This transitioned into a floor discussion involving everybody at the meet-up. That discussion began with basic questions such as “How do businesses use social media monitoring tools?” and then progressed into more detailed topics. In particular, we discussed how marketers use:
- SMM to find target markets.
- Sentiment analysis to generate leads for direct marketing.
- Data produced by SMM tools to interpret customer opinion.
Kimling, Chase, and I answered these questions and shifted the discussion from our panel to the entire group. We actually said at one point that we don’t want it to be a panel discussion! In all, a lot of meet-ups cover introductory topics and many professionals don’t learn much as a result. I hope all group members learned something since we went so in-depth. Come back next month for even more interesting discussion around social media monitoring tools!
