Wide Angle

Regardless of your company’s level of investment – or interest – in social media, someone on your team should be monitoring your brand online.   Depending on which you have more of – time or money – there’s a social media listening system that’s right for you.

 We see marketers taking three different approaches to social media monitoring:

• The “Home Grown” Listening System:  Marketers with more time than money can take advantage of the dozens of free social media monitoring tools available to build their own listening system.  For ideas on how to get started, check out MarketingProfs’ article on 13 Essential Social Media Listening Tools.

• The “Off the Shelf” Solution:  Marketers looking to get a more complete picture of what’s being said about their brand online can contract with vendors like Radian 6 or Techrigy that track trends and sentiment, typically starting around US$600/month.

• The “Custom Build” Platform:  Marketers making a serious investment in social media monitoring can partner with providers like Visible Technologies or BuzzMetrics that help companies design monitoring platforms tailored to their specific business needs.

Regardless of which listening system you choose, you should be listening for three things:

1. Who’s Doing the Talking?

Dig beyond demographics to understand who’s using social media — and why.   Is social media attracting your lead users?  Or providing an outlet for your most frustrated?  Figuring out which of your customers are online will help you put their comments into context, separating out fringe noise from meaningful trends.

2. What Are They Saying?

Analyzing sentiment and tracking tone of voice are two of the most hyped metrics out there.  But lifting above the trend lines lets you get some rich qualitative feedback on your business.  While social media monitoring isn’t a replacement for traditional market research, listening to the buzz online lets you “eavesdrop” on conversations that you wouldn’t have otherwise been privy to, which can be a very powerful window into how your customers think.

In addition to giving you a more colorful view of your customers, collecting these anecdotes can help you build the business case for social media and rally executive support.  For example, I recently spoke with an executive in a highly-regulated industry who compiles a monthly “muscle report” detailing everything the company wouldn’t have known about their customers if they hadn’t been paying attention to social media.  She distributes this one-pager to the General Managers across the company’s different departments to demonstrate why listening is so critical to the company – and why it’s worth increasing their investment in the space.  Smart!

3. What Else Are They Talking About?

Listening is about more than measuring your brand’s share of voice.  The best listeners look above-category to understand the different types of conversations their target audience is having online so that they can figure out which conversations their brand should own.

For example, if you are “Blue Bank,” taking this above-category approach to listening would mean that you’re not just tracking what people say about you and your competitors, but also paying attention to what else people who talk about banks like to talk about online.  This view could lead you to discover that people who talk about your bank also talk about the healthcare debate or the World Cup playoffs – significantly expanding the ways and places you could connect with your customers.

MLC Members:

Check out the recent Digital Media Forum discussion to get your peers’ perspective on different social media monitoring vendors they’ve worked with – more reviews and ratings can be found here.

And be sure to listen to the replay of our popular webinar Building Your Social Media Strategy.

Related posts:

1. The Social Media Mistake You Don’t Know You’re Making