Social Media for Lawyers -- Part 9: Social Mention

My colleague, Laura Powers, president of HG Marketing Group in Doylestown, Pa., recently told me about Social Mention.

 According to their Web site, “Social Mention is a social media search engine that searches user-generated content such as blogs, comments, bookmarks, events, news, videos, and microblogging services” like Twitter.

 

The site says, “It allows you to easily track what people are saying about you, your company, a new product, or any topic across the web’s social media landscape in real-time.”

 

So, I immediately tested it out. I searched first for “public relations lawyers” not in quotes, in the blog category. The site generated a message stating, “Aggregating A-list ecologies ...” Hmmm – more new Internet language. (Note to self: Find out what that means.) Then it spat out 170 results of which www.ThePRLawyer (our company blog) was No. 2. So I thought, “Very good.” It also showed the results of the blog sources it searched (see below). Yet another reason why you have to make sure your blog is cataloged. (For my thoughts about blogging for lawyers, click here.)

 

50	yahoo.com
47	blogsearch.google.com
24	blogcatalog.com
20	technorati.com
10	live.com
10	technet.com
9	wordpress.com

 

The next search I ran in the blogs category was for “Furia Rubel” -- in quotes -- which is my company’s name. This time, I got the message, “Engaging beta-tested value ...” Yet more language that needs to be interpreted. This time I found 65 mentions – not bad. I left my company name in the search field and then clicked on each of the various categories: Microblogs, Bookmarks, Comments, Events, Images, News, Video, Audio, Q&A and All. The results are very telling about where social media has been engaged well and where it can be improved.

 

When I searched “legal marketing” -- in quotes -- I got the message “Engaging citizen-media network effects...” Now, I’m starting to wonder, is all of this gibberish or it is going to be called socialmentionian? The first result was for an ABA article, “Law Blogs Are ‘Cheapest Thing You Can Do’ to Market Practice, Lawyer Says.” The rest of the results on the first page didn’t appear to be on point.

 

So far, I like this site as a social media strategy tool. It is clean, easy to follow, organized and allows you to identify trends. I also think it has some kinks that need to be worked out.

 

Powers said, “We have been using Social Mention to track client names as they are mentioned throughout the Web, particularly in blog posts. The fact that Social Mention aggregates the search on all these platforms makes it easier for us to monitor conversations and measure client impact in the social media arena.”

 

The site goes on to explain that, “search results are aggregated from numerous popular social media sources, including Google blog search, Twitter, Delicious, FriendFeed, Flickr, Digg, YouTube etc. and remixed as a single stream of information. The data is fresh, which means you can track conversations as they are happening in real-time.”

 

In addition to Web-based search results, Social Mention says that it “also features email alerts and personalized RSS feeds for automatic and instant updates.” I found the RSS feed at http://blog.socialmention.com/rss and I found a Twitter URL at http://twitter.com/socialmention. At the time I drafted this blog, I had not yet found the “email alerts.” Jon Cianciullo, the developer of Social Mention, told me that they were  “working to have the email notifications back up soon – especially because that is one of the most requested features.”

 

All in all, Social Mention may prove to be a very valuable tool over time – but only time will tell.

 

I am interested to hear about your own experiences with social media and welcome your comments and feedback. I will do my best to address them in future topics.

 

Gina F. Rubel, Esq.
Furia Rubel Communications, Inc.
http://www.furiarubel.com/