Why is monitoring important?

There are more and more companies sprouting up every year dedicated solely to monitoring online media. These companies are improving their products as the digital media world evolves.

Nowadays the best tools will capture all online mentions, both social and traditional media, which in effect replaces a clipping service while adding new services. After harvesting the data from traditional media outlets with an online presence, social networks, blogs, discussion boards and video and photo sharing sites the monitoring tools will analyze the posts/articles.

Not every monitoring product will capture posts from all these locations, so make sure you ask the salesperson or analyst that is demoing their product for you what sources they monitor.

The top products will provide trends in conversation, sentiment breakdowns, tag clouds, gleaned insights for marketing and public relations purposes, opportunities for engagement and much more.


These products can range from $1,000 at the low end to $100,000 at the high end. Even if you don't have any money for monitoring services, you should be manually monitoring your brand. There are plenty of free tools to search by tag/key term. Google alerts, Google News, Google Blogs, Twitter search, Ice Rocket, Twendz, Technorati, etc. are a good place to start.

No matter what, make sure you are listening.

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Step by Step Social Media Guide for Brands

Most brands and companies have at least dipped their feet in the waters of social media at this point, but if they haven't it can be daunting for them to start. First, social media is confusing for those that aren't intimately involved in it. There are thousands of communication platforms, a set of new languages and some technical skills required. Second, the brands that aren't using social media are behind the curve and therefore might feel like they can't catch up.

There is no doubt that your brand's social media experience should be completely unique. It should depend on your service/produce, your audience, your goals, your budget and many other variables. With that said, this list is meant to provide a general guideline on what needs to be done to truly leverage social media:

1. Monitor And Listen

This is a vital step. You have to listen to your communities of interest. You need to figure out what they're saying about you and your competitors, as well as determining where they are saying it. Is there a large contingency on Facebook, or is the bulk of you audience congregating on Ning? Are they on 7 different platforms?

Listening can be time consuming or costly (depending on your choice of monitoring method), but as I said before it is vital. Monitoring enables your brand to go straight into a strategy with insight and intelligence. It removes a large part of the guess and check of social media.

If you have no budget, you can start with Google alerts about key terms. If you have a budget their are great monitoring tools out there ranging in price from a few dollars a month to a few thousand dollars a month. The price range is affected by the level of insight you are getting from the monitoring company. If you're looking into hiring a monitoring company or licensing their program, I highly recommend one that provides both quantitative and qualitative insights.

2. Develop A Strategy

Now that you know what your target audience is saying and where they are saying, it is time to put a plan in place. Do you want to build a Twitter account, create a blog, comment on popular sites in existence? These are all questions you have to ask.

In addition to the action items, it must be determined who will be doing the social media work internally. It is pointless and potentially harmful to create social media landing pages and profiles for your brand if the content and engagement isn't going to continue. You should figure out ahead of time who will be in charge of the accounts and consumer interactions moving forward.

3. Construct Your Landing Pages

Now it is time to take action. You've done your due diligence, you've decided on the plan and who will be in charge, it is time to set up your landing page(s) and/or profiles. Most social media platforms are pretty easy to set up. This is even more true of social networks like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and several others. Video/photo sharing channels, Ning accounts, discussion board account, and social bookmarking accounts are also easy to create. Blogs are a little more difficult. The most basic blogs are fairly easy on blogger, wordpress and typepad. If you want to get creative with your blog you might want to seek the help of a knowledgable source.

4. Establish Your Social Media Point Of View

Okay so you have the landing pages or profiles. Now yo have to put up content. Whether is is a blog post, a tweet or something else, you have to produce regular content. This will prove to your audience that you're there to stay, while showing them what value they will be getting from you.

5. Network And Engage

After you've posted content regularly for some time, you need to network with people in your audience. Reach out to the most influential people, share your posts with other sites in your industry and register your Twitter account or blog on directory sites.

It is also key to engage your audience through these communication channels. Ask them questions, respond to inquiries, talk about the things they post about and anything else that might fit.
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This is just a basic layout. If you want to get a little more detailed or have critiques of this social media to-do list please reach out and let me know.

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Let's Get The Ball Rolling

I’ve started this blog for a couple of reasons. First, I just love talking about social media. Second, I want to share the knowledge I’ve obtained through my years of work in social media and learn from everybody else out there that have so much to offer.

We’ll start with a little bit of background. I graduated from Kenyon College with a degree in psychology of all things. I know all you non-psychology majors out there are saying “what’s he going to do with that” or “way to play it safe,” but it really has been useful in this industry I am a part of. Soon after school, I began working as a media analyst as a communications/public relations company in Charlotte. The clientele consisted of primarily sports and entertainment brands. Within months I was given the opportunity to help shape the direction, services and other major components of the social media side of the company as the Director of New Media. I’ve been at this post for quite some time now. I really enjoy and think I’ve helped to make major strides for my company.

There are certainly going to be people out there that are more knowledgeable than me with each individual skill, but I like to think of myself as well-rounded in social media. I’m well versed in general best practices, macro and micro strategies, monitoring and metrics, the debate about ROI, how best to integrate social media in a cross-platform marketing strategy and many other things.

Now for my philosophy…social media is about building relationships. Every day I find somebody who is wrapped up in the newest technology or the race to get 10,000 followers on Twitter. I try to remind them that social media is about people, trust and community. At its very core, social media should be about having a conversation one-to-one or one-to-many.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for learning about the next big communication channel and new flashy widgets, but I will always keep the personal and social aspect of our world at the forefront. Hopefully you’ll be able to glean some insight from me, but even more than that I’m hoping you engage in a conversation with me and we build on what is already out there in the social media world.

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