Social Media for social engagement

Yet another way to manage social media feeds is through yet another Internet start -up.  (Clearly, social media has become unmanageable for the untrained user).  Socialmention.com is a tool that alerts users to updates posted by their clientele on any number of social media websites.  Users customize their preferences and Socialmention sends a daily "activity report" via email of status messages, updates and other posts of the clients selected by the user.  Alerts are created by keyword-like inputs into Socialmention's site.  Like any keyword usage, though, users are advised to be careful about what and how they enter.  The key to key-wording is to be precise yet brief: Socialmention uses exact phrasing and takes quotation marks into account in its searches of the Internet.

Socialmention scans the newspapers of the e-world if a user's alert-request is to follow a developing news story, Twitter or Facebook (or the like) if the user's input is social media related, and the general ether-world if the user wants to follow a certain brand or idea.  With Socialmention, users can customize and filter the e-tons information uploaded to social media every nanosecond without even having to leave their inboxes.  As the site advertises, Socialmention is "like Google alerts for social media."  Users can select the language, email type (html or text), and media type (anywhere from bogs to images to videos or "all of the above") for their keyword or phrase and create as many Socialmention alerts as they so desire.  The only catch is that the frequency cannot be changed: users must receive email updates daily.

With all the information out there, this makes sense.  If the "weekly" option were available for the frequency of Socialmention updates, it would probably take a week just to get through the email.  The point of Socialmention's service is to aggregate all the social media mentions of a particular interest to the user made on that day.  And the point of that, of course, is to facilitate socializing.  Common ground is an important way people initially connect in the real world, and Socialmention helps people find that in the social media world.

Just as retweeting is a sign of respect, it is also a sign of commonality.  Indicating mutual interest in the real world could mean friendship.  In the social media world, it means instant connection and unknowable potential.  Socialmention is merely a way to collect all the potential social media connections out there from which users can then pick and choose.

Because sites like Socialmention exist, it is all the more important to thoughtfully utilize social media sites.  Just as profiles are only as good as how they're used, Socialmention can only effectively pick up posts from social media outlets and deliver them to the right people if the information on social media sites is optimized for social (again, read: relational) connection.

Photo Credit: socialmention.com