In other words, how does my company benefit from actively taking part in?

Before discussing benefits or specific actions, it is fundamental to have a strategy rather than diving in head first. It’s essential to have a community strategy and define objectives that we want to achieve. However, every company can focus on the following objectives:

• - Maximising the brand’s relationship with its clients through technology and new media.
• - Showing why we are different; why we are better. What added value we offer compared to our competitors.
• - Sharing our ideas with our users. Identifying what links allow us to connect with our community.
• - Following the evolution of the clients’ way of thinking, adapting to new consumer habits.

But, where should we invest our time and resources? A brand must be conscious of its position and optimise the resources it has at its disposal. Where should I begin?

• - Your web page is your brand. It’s essential to have your own community and a place where your clients can find answers to their questions, complaints or concerns.
• - To position in social networks. Having a Facebook page or a Twitter account just for the sake of it won’t achieve anything. We must be active, giving what we do and say on social networks a value.
• - We must be where the users are. The rules of the game have changed. No brand, no matter how big, can ignore the opinions produced in Social Media. It gets more and more important to recognise the opinion leaders of a community and to connect with them.

So, what are the benefits of participating in Social Media?

• - Having a presence in Social Media will enable us to influence the decisions made by our potential consumers. We will make consumers aware of our existence, or refresh their memories. In other words, we will give our brand value.
• - We will know who our clients are and we will be able to make ourselves known to them. This knowledge will allow us to interact with our community, knowing the opinion and taste of our users. But more importantly, they will feel that the brand is with them, that there is someone there to listen to them..
• - Our success is first of all measured in consumers. Thanks to interacting with them in Social Media we can constantly optimise our products and sales strategies. We will objectively know what services work and which are the ones that don’t. We will be able to take the pulse of community opinion more efficiently and get the ROI of the brand.

Giving value to our brand, connecting with our community, optimising our products and sales strategies, detecting our mistakes and correcting them… is it, or is it not worthwhile investing in Social Media?

Toyota highly values the things people say about its brand in Social Media and it has taken to listening to its consumers. The objective is none other than to face its clients, to actively participate in conversations and have an influence on its consumers’ opinions.

Toyota has fallen from grace into the depths of hell in a matter of months. From being the world leader in car sales, to living its worst image crisis due to a faulty accelerator in some models of its cars. Toyota has learnt a hard lesson about reputation in a very cruel way. It had taken years for the brand to create an excellent brand image and it’s all gone down the drain in a matter of days.

However, Toyota has been able to draw positive conclusions from this lesson and this says a lot about this great brand. Toyota is conscious of the importance that its reputation has and hasn’t stayed arms crossed when faced with this apparently prejudicial situation. The company has got down to work making a big effort to reverse this situation. Social Media.

This fact has had a very positive effect among Toyota clients, because they have been shown that Toyota listens to them. To err is human, to admit the error is divine. The image of the president of Toyota apologising to its clients sets quite an example of launching a brand facelift campaign.

It’s been interesting to see how Toyota has used a Brand Monitoring tool to track opinions about its brand on Twitter. But it’s been even more surprising to see that the company hasn’t merely stuck to monitoring, but has started to dialogue with consumers on twitter.

But what about blogs? Tools such as Noteca are especially suitable for managing online reputation and allowing fast and efficient reactions to this kind of a situation. With Noteca, Toyota would have been able to monitor mentions about its brand on Twitter, in blogs and comments. Furthermore, it would have been able to see who the most influential authors were in order to be able to optimise its efforts.

Noteca is an application specifically designed for conversing and participating in Social Media; in the channels where the reputation of a brand is built. In addition, you can follow all the conversations you have taken part in, as well as measuring the influence of your brand thanks to the statistics generated and thus compare yourself to other brands.

Noteca is a web app specifically designed for the emerging profession of online Community Managers. Many of Noteca’s design features are ideal for carrying out an effective community management strategy. Below are the reasons why:

• - Listen, to Build Brand Visibility: It’s essential to listen to your community and get a feel for your brand’s reputation in the space of Social Media. Noteca helps Community Managers to know at all times what’s being said about their brand, their competitors, and similar companies related to their sector. If we don’t know the image being projected about our brand, we are much less in a position to devise a suitable strategy for community management.
• - Identify key opinion leaders: Markets are becoming increasingly segmented and each sector has its own opinion leaders. It’s vital for Community Managers to spot influential people. Noteca tells you directly whether an author is influential or not. A positive or negative opinion of an opinion leader cannot be ignored by any brand. Silence is the worst response.
• - Listen and learn from your community: It’s vital to listen and take in client comments to build a positive online reputation and a solid brand image. People can pick up on our mistakes but also set us on the right path to correct them. Brands are no longer advertised. They connect, share and collaborate with clients. Noteca helps you keep track of every conversation.
• - Customer service and technical support: The Community Managers must know all about their business and know what department or person is best indicated to resolve each situation. Sometimes complaints arise because clients haven’t been able to find the right person to deal with. With Noteca you can organize your web-based tasks and assign what person should deal with each task.
• - Converse and participate: Good Community Managers should be the voice of the company and explain brand positioning to the community. It’s not enough to attract users. Brands should make use of the channels that potential clients use. Noteca is an application specifically designed for conversing and participating in the space of Social Media, through channels where brand reputation is built. Community Managers should be active and take part. Noteca makes this easy.
• - Engage with your community: Having a good agenda with contact details is important, but it’s much more important to remember who’s who and what we’ve said to them at all times. Noteca allows you to keep track of all conversations arranged by contact. You can also add notes to each contact about experiences you’ve had. This way it’s much easier to connect with your community.
• - Analyze the results of your activities: It’s essential to follow up on your activities as Community Manager and take note of the impact they have on Social Media. The statistics that Noteca provides will enable you to see the influence of your brand on Social Media and calculate your ROI.

Through Noteca we’re discovering some very interesting things about Social Media, especially about Twitter. Our attention has been powerfully drawn to a fact we have obtained about cloned tweets, because almost 36% of tweets relating to Social Media matters are almost identical.

Interestingly, this phenomenon is even more pronounced, if that were possible, in trending topics. Tweets relating to Social Media Marketing, Brand Monitoring or Branding are the preferred targets of the bots and users who fraudulently use the tool.

Consequently the noise level that these kinds of tweets by spammers produce in searches is overwhelming. Such an enormous amount of repetition makes searches lose their effectiveness due to the noise. It’s impossible to follow conversations and the situation becomes unmanageable.

Thanks to Noteca we have detected the problem. In our interface we group identical tweets because they are robotic replicas and provide no value to users, and we only show the tweet from the most influential author. However, there is a small percentage of users who repeat the tweets of others without indicating that it is an RT.

Ferran Adrià is considered the best chef in the world, and El Bulli, is reputed to be the best restaurant. What possible reasons could this genius have for leaving it all for a while? The answer he has given to the world is a complete declaration of intentions “I want to improve; I want to be more creative”.

Ferran Adrià is a reference in the world of cuisine, and his decisions and actions can be applied to many aspects of personal and professional life. Here’s how he explained his reasons:

• - “Being the best now doesn’t guarantee that you will be in the future”. A lesson in humbleness.
• - “Research and innovation”. He isn’t stopping working; he’s simply stepping out of the limelight in order to continue to grow. El Bulli will stay open as a research laboratory.
• - “Creativity, creativity, creativity”. There are millions of chefs in the world. If you continue to do the same thing, eventually someone will do it better than you.
• - “Honesty and professional ethics”. He knew it wasn’t ethical to keep doing the same thing for a few more years, taking advantage of his fame.
• - “We’re not ruling out the possibility of spending three months in China, getting to know Japan better or Peruvian cuisine”. It’s important to discover other cultures.
• - “El Bulli was built on challenges, and this is the latest one”. Overcoming adversity.
• - “Pressure with passion”. Being in the eye of the storm helps you improve, the more so if what you do is your true passion in life.
• - “I made this decision in order to remain happy”. The main reason for being.

Humbleness, innovation, creativity, honesty, culture, self-improvement, passion. Are we talking merely about cooking?

We start up our engines. Few seconds ago we opened up the access to the Noteca beta. Early users who signed up on our homepage are receiving the access details to test our webapp.

You can still apply for trying the Noteca beta a few more days, so if you want to try Noteca you’re still on time. You can do so from the Noteca site.

We are noteca and work with Social Media.

Here is a second tracklist that inspires us at the Noteca team when we’re working:

• Radiohead - 2+2=5
• Queens of the Stone Age – The Blood is Love
• The Temper Trap – Sweet Disposition
• Bloc Party – Helicopter
• Madonna vs David Guetta – Revolver (One Love Remix)
• Lady Gaga – Bad Romance
• Weezer – The Good Life
• New Order – 60 Miles an Hour
• Caetano Veloso – Mora Na Filosofia
• Prince – Sexy M.F.
• Basement Jaxx – What’s Your Head At
• Green Day – Welcome to Paradise
• Death From Above 1979 – Romantic Rights
• Air – Sexy Boy

Remember our first tracklist? What songs do you like for working?

Noteca is a web-app which incorporates the entire process of conversing through Social Media. However, off-line conversations and those held within a team are just as important as those held in Social Media. With the Noteca tasks you won’t forget anything and you can organise your time and that of your work group, simply and easily.

We search, analyse, discuss. Then what?

In the New Mentions screen we decide where we’re going to hold a conversation, in Conversations we join a conversation and in Contacts we keep a record of the people we have conversed to. And after that? The tasks help you to decide the next step to take and to recall decisions.

For example: We make a comment on a Techcrunch post which talk about one of our clients’ products. I have an idea for a viral campaign, so I make a note of this. But as well as that, I create a task to request a meeting with the client’s marketing director and another to remind me to send a thank-you e-mail to the author of the post.

Flexible and easy to introduce

We all know that coordinating agendas is very often a juggling act, for that reason Noteca’s tasks are flexible and allow you to reassign today’s task to tomorrow, to as soon as possible or to a specific date.

Noteca’s tasks can be adapted to any kind of business because they have categories that are created by the very users of the application themselves. Therefore, it is easier to introduce Noteca into work management terms and the methodology of each business. Furthermore, we avoid having a long list of nonsensical tasks and we can identify tasks on first sight thanks to their categories.

It coordinates, assigns and links

Noteca’s tasks are created specifically for team work and its coordination. With Noteca you can assign tasks to any member of the team as well as to external users.

Furthermore, if assigned to people, these tasks can be linked to a specific post, comment or tweet from the Conversations sidebar. It is therefore much easier to remember where the conversation, which led us to the next step, began.

I am fascinated by Google’s new mobile, the Nexus One. But I’m also fascinated by the iPhone!. I wanted to compare their icons to see which of the two is better.

What makes a better icon? For me a better icon is a clearer icon. A better metaphor. Why only compare the icons? Because to be able to compare other functions I would first have to get my hands on a Nexus. Icons are a fundamental part of any interface. For both phones the interface is critical, great lengths have been gone to and it is interesting to compare them.

Telephone:
Both icons are good because the metaphor is simple: a telephone. But there are some differences. Whilst for Apple this function is represented by the colour green (more positive, cheerful), for Google it is blue (relaxation, tranquillity). I think green is a better choice. And whilst for Apple the telephone should be “off the hook” (facing up) and in the normal talking position (as though placed to the ear) for Google it is facing down (slightly inclined) as if being lifted at that moment (or it could even be seen as being hung up). Personally I think the position of the telephone in the Nexus One icon is the better choice, but not as far as the colour is concerned. Apple’s choice of colour makes more sense. For that reason I’ve left is as a draw, because neither is particularly more outstanding than the other. It was a very obvious icon.

Browser:
Yes, Apple hasn’t really got it right with the Safari icon. It’s perfectly interchangeable with the iPhone’s compass icon. Google hasn’t done much better. The image of the globe of the earth is perfect for its Google Maps and well…it can also be used for an Internet browser. For this reason I’ve made the Nexus One proposal the winner, but my favourite icon is still Netscape’s.

Maps:
Both could be improved. Confusing, with too much detail… The iPhone adds a traffic light which doesn’t make much sense (Google Maps is a difficult tool to use whilst driving). However, the metaphor of the unfolded map which Nexus One presents is interesting, but it is still confusing due to the small size of the icon. I was going to leave it as a draw, but I think that in general Apple’s icon is somewhat better for representing this function.

Photographs:
The image of a sunflower is a daring proposal. It’s more usual to represent a photograph with a landscape, or another type of flower (a daisy?). The rival icon uses the idea of a horizon, but it’s a bit strange. The frame around the image however, makes it easier to understand as a metaphor. It’s close but I think Nexus One deserves to win this round.

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