Dawud has an interesting point that people love to share things, so how do you get people to start talking about you? What do you do to make sure people on the Internet want to talk about you and share your content with each other? Well for starters, you want to be interesting and write/say/record something worth while but more to the point you want it to be interesting and hopefully entertaining enough that people out there want … no .. need to share it with others.

Way back in 2006 when the whole Internet thing was still young(ish), Starbucks did a great job of marketing online by sending out email based coupons to their employees, with the idea that they’d invite a friend to share. Unfortunately for the coffee giant those coupons spread like wild fire around the web and they found themselves with egg on their face.

What’s the sad part of this story? That they didn’t know about the backlash until it was already spreading into their stores. The Internet isn’t like a well choreographed Sunday newspaper. It’s more like a chaotic classroom on the first day of kindergarten. You might think the grown up is in charge but just like on the web, those little people will take advantage of any sign of weakness. Worse yet, if you don’t know there’s trouble your classroom will be in chaos before you get to nap time.

What Starbuck’s needed was something that was just appearing on the horizon of the Internet way back then, it’s a little tool called Social Media Monitoring and what it does is keep track of your products or people across the Internet by monitoring blogs, videos and other popular forms of social media. In essence, it’s big brother but he’s working for you. In essence, it reads millions of website every hour and tells you what’s being said about you.

A local company here in Fredericton called Radian6 is leading the pack at the moment by offering  a lot of control over how you monitor the web. Clients can select which channels they want to track (eg blogs, forums, videos etc.) as well as languages or just a specific list of blogs. There’s a ton of criteria and just like Google Analytics, a massive volume of data being pulled out of it. It tracks and compliles everything from Digg to del.icio.us in order to tell you who’s talking about you … and what they’re saying.