Series introduction (October 12, 2011)

Part 1: starting from scratch (October 23, 2011)

Part 2: Setting objectives and measurement (October 23, 2011)

Part 3: Choosing your first social network (November 2, 2011)

Part 4 Interactive use of social media (November 22, 2011)

Part 5: monitoring social media as a routine and going into crisis mode (December 20, 2011)

Monitoring social networks should now be part of any organization's daily routine and procedures. You can even real-life events to test how you could ramp up your monitoring during a crisis. Here's a recent post on what you can do to test how you keep track on social media. 

Here's how i defined "conversational use" of social media in the series introduction:

Conversational use of SM: the first real true stage of social media engagement, the Listen, Learn, Engage formula. Now that we know who our key stakeholders who may be helpful to us are, we actually go out and engage with them on social media platforms. We know who to interact with to counter false information and dispel rumours. A key selling point: engaging in SM will help us create a favourable public perception of our response.

 What you need to do:

• find out what discussions are taking place ... what hashtags ( a way to organize topics on Twitter) are being used by your audiences for the incident or disaster .... you can use tools such as Kurrently, Social Mention, and many more (see previous posts) 
• determine who's being most "talkative" and help gauge their influence: you can use tools such as Klout, SocialBro, TweetReach, and more 
• identify key bloggers who can sway your audience's perception through their analysis and writing. Use Google Blog search and other tools