What is Community Mapping?

Using social media is an important part of marketing, PR and customer relations for any organisation that wants to effectively manage their reputation and win business online. Those interested in building up their online presence using Social Media may be interested in our one day Social Media Training course or SEO Course.

However, engaging with people via social media tools like Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and your blog can take up a lot of time, so it’s important to make sure that you get a good return on your investment – you need to know where to focus your efforts. At the end of the day, social media is about having conversations, and just like in the real world, you need to make sure you’re talking to the right people.

That’s where community mapping can help. Rather than randomly commenting on blogs and tweeting any Tom, Dick or Harry who’ll listen, its a good idea to build up a map of your online community, so that when you’ve got something to say, you know who to say it to in order to gain maximum exposure (and at the end of the day, win more business).

There’s more to community mapping than can fit in a short blog post – but here’s a list of 5 useful tools that will help you to get started, and how to use them:

1. Netvibes

Netvibes is a great tool for bringing together your own customised lists of blogs and other sites that are relevant to your industry.It’s like a noticeboard that you can stick RSS feeds to. This will give you an instant snapshot of what other people in your industry are discussing and what the hot topics are, so that you can contribute to the conversations. You can even set up different tabs, so if your company operates within more than one market or community you can set up a tab for each one. You may already know who the most influential bloggers are in your industry – if not, tools 3,4 and 5 in this list will help you. Next, lets set up a community map…

2. MindMeister

MindMeister is a useful mind-mapping tool to help you to visualise the important people, blogs, twitterers, directories and influencers in your marketplace, and how they all fit together. If you’ve used mind-mapping tools like Visio or MindManager, MindMeister is like an online version of those. In the centre, you can create an icon that represents your product or industry (say “Project Management Consultancy”, or “Organic Cosmetics” or whatever it is you do). From there you can create any number of “nodes” that branch off from here that contain lists of the most important people, links to blogs or websites, twitter accounts or whatever you like. You can then add connections between items, so if an influential person in your industry contributes regularly to a particular blog, connect them to it. A comprehensive guide on how to use MindMeister. OK – now we’ve got our map – who do we put on it!

3. Icerocket

If you’ve been active in your online community for a while, you’ll know where the conversations about your products and services are happening. If not, Icerocket is a great tool to help you find them. Essentially its a search engine for blogs. Just type in the name of your service or product (e.g “Photoshop training” or “wine online”) and Icerocket will find all of the blogs where people are talking about it. You can also search specifically for Twitter posts, or on MySpace, so you can target your search to where you think your product or service is most likely to be discussed. Find the most influential people, blogs, twitter feeds etc… and add them to your community map. Tip – be selective here – choose the people who have the most influence. Don’t pick people who’s last blog post was 6 months ago, or who have few twitter followers and never re-tweet anything. If they’re using Twitter, use Twitalyzer to assess their influence.

4. WhosTalkin

Similar to Icerocket, WhosTalkin is another search engine for blogs, Twitter, news networks, videos, tags and so on. As with Icerocket, enter your search term and off you go – you can then filter your results by platform (e.g. Twitter, MySpace, Google Blog Search) or by particular news networks such as the BBC or CNN, so that you can see what the latest media stories are about your particular product or service. If you can find journalists who regularly write about your industry you should definitely add them to your map.

5. Twitter Search

You can use the tools listed above to search Twitter, but Twitter also has its own built in search functionality with more advanced features. Click on the Advanced Search option and you can refine your search to find particular people, exact phrases and perhaps most usefully, you can refine your search by location. Set your search to within 50, 100 or 500 miles of where you are. This will help you to find people who are not only influential, but are close enough to you geographically to influence your potential market.

Putting it All Together

OK – so using these tools, you’ve built a community map of the most influential people in your network or marketplace… now what?

You need to start talking!

A good place to start is the Netvibes page you set up. Look at the other blogs in your industry and what’s being discussed every day, and write about it yourself. If you have a strong opinion about it – even better, you’re more likely to generate a debate. Write a blog post, comment on other influential blogs and link back to your blog post. This will drive traffic to your blog or site. Even better, influential people will mention you in their blogs and link to you.

Now look at your community map on MindMeister – find the most influential people and journalists and where they write. Speak to them on Twitter, point them in the direction of what you’ve written, retweet their comments, ask their opinion and so on. The more you do this, the more relationships you will build on line and you’ll get a reputation as a thought leader in your industry. If influential bloggers and journalists identify you as a regular supply of useful information and regularly refer to your blog or site as a source of information. This will mean more kudos (or whuffie), more traffic and hopefully, more business.

These are just a few of the community mapping tools you can use to build up a picture of your network. If you can suggest any other tools you use regularly, comment and let us know what they are.

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Community Mapping, course, IceRocket, MindMeister, Netvibes, Online Influence, optimization, reputation management, Search Engine Optimisation, SEO, seo course, social media, social media course, social media for business, social media marketing, Social Media Training, tools, training, Twitter, twitter for business, Twitter Search, WhosTalkin

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