With all the theory, blog, user generated content and social media gurus talking tweet bout conversations = community and so on, it always amazes me, at least in Australia how few case studies, or great everyday solutions we have downunder.

Which is why it’s best to rollup one sleeves and see what we can do to be part of solution not problem.

Right at moment for example, one thing I’m working on is determing what is the optimal report, tracking, wiki, etc format to provide a blue chip client and their agency(s) - A regular (realtime, daily, weekly, monthly ?) of when they and their brands are mentioned in “social media”.

Now it doesn’t help that with 8.1m unique Australian mainstream users of Facebook, that monitoring Facebook for a client and reporting back daily is pretty damn hard. Nay, manual. Damn hard. Which translates to expensive. And maybe something they might not want to do.

And all Facebook would need to do is make it’s brand specific data more public. Yeh I know it’s harder than that. But every site except Facebook has these lovely RSS feeds which I can plug into Google Reader, combine with some Postrank.com analytics, then present it all in Feedly.com - and Bob’s your uncle. Or whatever your client other than Bob is called.

Let’s say the client may get mentioned a few hundred times each week in social media. Now it’s (not yet) like Apple, when a new product release gets 2k direct mentions every minute!

NYT "The New York Times Research Labs created a real-time look at Twitter mentions related to the Apple announcement on Wednesday. At its peak, iPad-related messages were coming through Twitter at an average of 2,200 a minute, and maintained steadily at around 1,500 a minute hours after the briefing ended."

So I dont have the New York Time Research Labs that can on a whim create a Real Time Tracking of Apple’s new iPad Tablet product and related tweets. I wish they would open source the tool they used above and I could slot in my clients and prospects brand names and related phrases that consumers use when “creating” “communicating” and consuming online.

But maybe someone has a simple solution : How do I combine hundreds of screenshots of client brand mentions, with a spreadsheet detailing multiple columns around the mention (which social media site, by which influencer, what did they say, what is the url, was the sentiment positive or negative, which of client’s brands were they talking about etc) ?

So I need to be able to provide a daily, weekly and monthly on and offline solution that combines excel “brand” mentions in social media with screenshots.. with formats like PDF and .PPT + .XLS being especially liked.

So far any mention is captured in Google Reader - whose shared items have an atom feed as output - I’m entering “brand mentions” data into excel, exporting to google docs, where I’m also uploading screenshots of hundreds of client mentions… The client mentions are stored in google reader shared items - whose feed uploads to tabbloid.com, fivefilters.org and rss2pdf.com - which all do an ok but not great job at converting an rss feed into a pdf report.

The problem with nearly all of the above solutions is lack of customisation. Now about a 109k euros Panerai hehe !

But if I could just somehow get the screenshots (Clients love pictures) with the excel/gdocs which tracks the hundreds of mentions…

Then one day the system will do all the matching, filtering, report conversion and delivery and clients and prospects will be very happy and pay lots of money.

Until then I’ll continue hacking around… In a world that feels a mile away from the new social media world utopia which seems to run rampant on Twitter.

OK Later it’s hot, I’m having a Fat Yak. Feel free to check my latest Polyvore set.

Or, Feel free to check my latest Polyvore set.