China’s biggest social networking site Renren.com has recently launched five new exciting products: Renren Like, Renren Places, Renren Aiting, Renren Party and an updated Public Page.

According to the company, the official launch, which took place on November 11, will serve to enhance the businesses core values of social sharing and entertainment for everyone.

Using Renren Like, users can easily share interesting content with their friends on Renren.com. When the user clicks the “like” button on a third party site, the story will appear in the user’s friend’s Renren.com News Feed.

Renren Places, meanwhile, the company’s new location-based services offering, provides a fun, fashionable and advanced check-in service for mobile users. Users can share their location, check out which friends are nearby, and get deals from nearby retail outlets. With Renren Places, users never miss another chance to connect with friends both online and off.

Their API as of yet hasn’t been updated to include the functionality for developers but its an interesting development. I’ve joined today to start checking out their growth.

Is it just me or are social media agencies all blogging about the same thing?

• Mobile Commerce to take off in 2011
• New Facebook profiles being used to create funny mosaics
• Facebook to overtake Google
• 5 ways to do {insert rehashed Hubspot post}

Not only is this useless information, they’re usually a copy-and-paste job from social bookmarking sites like Reddit or Digg. They rarely offer insight and are completely self promotional rubbish that sums up the problem with the industry. Bullshit.

If you’re going to write a blog, at least attempt to have a professional slant.

</rant>

It doesn’t matter which social media monitoring service you use. None of them do what you want them to do. They’re good at doing part of the job, but not all of it. And sadly, they probably won’t ever be good at doing all of the job because you have to do it.

Social media monitoring, whether done with free services like Google Alerts and custom searches, SocialMention.com or even freemium versions of great tools like Trackur; or using paid services like Radian6, Sysomos, Alterian, HubSpot or Scout Labs, are all software platforms. They’re computer algorithms and search spiders that collect information and put it together in a place where you can find it. Some of them do a decent job of organizing and stacking and sorting all that data so you can hit a button and get a pretty chart or graph, too.

But none of them do what you want them to do. They only do half the job.

None of them tell you what to do with the information.

The social media monitoring service that wins in the long run will do that. But none of them want to do that because that’s not software. That’s service. Not customer service, which most of them are great at, but strategic services. Strategic services require talent, time and costs. Algorithms don’t.

Social media monitoring is only as good as the decision-maker who does something with the intelligence.

That’s why clear results and filtering is required.

Sentiment analysis and monitoring your own mentions is only a piece of the jigsaw. Think of the other questions you could be asking like:

• What products are popular with my biggest competitor online?
• Who’s blogging and setting the trends in my industry?
• Is there a demand for “New Product X”?
• Who’s buying my items?

Social media monitoring can be a huge waste of time if criteria aren’t set, managed correctly they can be a powerful tool.

Fan counts and followers seem to be the metric of choice for most brands.

I can see why, they create nice graphs and pie-charts, can be attributed to factor x or y and are a tangible metric right? Well not so right really.

I think everyone remembers (and some still see) the crappy banners with “1000th Visitor – You’ve won a prize!” or “Trojan Virus Discovered!” flashing in neon. The idea is get alot of eyeballs to your page and then eventually someone will buy your product. Well something similar is happening on Facebook and they don’t seem to be too keen on sorting it out themselves.

Check out Nike’s “click like to watch this video” tab on their Facebook page. It’s blackmailing fans into becoming a fan so they can watch their videos, bit shitty from Nike considering they’ve already got people on the page.

Other sites are starting to introduce link-bait ads. Like the ones pictured to the right. Not only are they irrelevant to the context of the page, they’re manipulative. People would assume they’re simply stating they like “Scooby Doo” where as in reality, they’re signing up to a spam machine.

View more presentations from brimsm.

So you created a friend page for your business, not an amazingly hard mistake to make.

You added some followers, ran a few promotions to build up your presence, next thing you reached your limit, 5000 users and that’s it.

Great, thanks for that Facebook.

We’re seeing this ALOT. What we don’t see much of, is a means to fix this!

Can facebook auto-convert a friend page to a fan page? Nope.

Can I just post an update to tell people to move over? Yeap but updates will get swallowed in your stream.

So we came to the conclusion that the only way we could get people over is to group email people. That’s fine but have you tried group emailing 5000 people? Someone has to sit down and physically type in thousands of emails.

So we thought, how can we do this without driving an employee insane? We thought about using GreaseMonkey but Facebook has all kinds of caching that makes it depressingly difficult. So we went with a macro generator and java tool. Sounds complex right? Well it’s not so bad.

The macro generator records keystrokes and mouse clicks so we first generated a typical script. Click new message, click name, click subject, click send. So this will loop to infinity but we really need to put some people names and personalised emails in right?

So we edit the script using a weensy bit of java, all we do is connect to the businesses Facebook page using their authentication token and pull back a list of their friends. We then edit the macro script for each friend and can personalise the message fairly easily too. Can even do something like if the person is under 20 could read

“Hey Dave, We’re moving to our fanpage and would love for you to join us” or for the over 60s

“Dear John, Due to your old age we think you’re better suited as a fan” etc. you get the picture. Tailor it to the information.

Put in your link to your fanpage and a nice voucher image like we did and hey presto, group emailing without the pain and with all of the customisation (and you can tailor it however you want).

We’re doing this for some of our clients right now and if you’d like us to help your business, drop us a line. We don’t bite and think of the potential mental health problems you’ll be saving your employee who’d normally have to type this up by hand!

Check out this site for some weird problems people are having with this.