Social media monitoring: yay or nay?
Ok, obviously we need to track our brand’s activity in social media, but do we need a brand new tool to do so efficiently?
I’m not sure. The majority of my experience has been with small companies who wouldn’t pay (or even have the need for) media monitoring services. Instead I would set up Google Alerts, read industry publications and blogs, and just really do all the monitoring myself. And then if I had time I would do my own analysis.
However, in a larger organization, obviously this is more than one person can manage. Media monitoring services are thorough, experts in the field and can provide a third-party perspective on your media coverage. Tools available online often take a self-serve approach but look like they provide a lot of great easy-to-understand info.
I’ve decided I’m going to take a closer look at a few of the players in both the traditional media monitoring services which are adapting to social media needs, as well as new tools strictly for managing social media monitoring. In the meantime, however, I’d love to hear your thoughts, opinions, and ideas on the topic…
April 9th, 2008 at 12:24 am
Kelly,
Of all the tools that I have checked out Blogpulse is a really good free one. It has really good trend and conversation tracking tools which are free.
http://blogpulse.com/trend
http://blogpulse.com/conversation
On the pay side, I have seen a demo for Radian6 and it looks really good. Love of great charts and visual tools.
http://www.radian6.com
Hope that helps,
Scott
April 9th, 2008 at 12:34 pm
Thanks for the mention Scott, really appreciate the kudos.
Kelly, we’d love to take you through a demo of the Radian6 solution any time to help with your decision on what to use for each situation.
You are absolutely right that with brands that have a lot of conversations (or brands that have competitors with a lot of conversations they would also like to monitor) the job of staying 100% on top of things gets a lot harder to do with the free tools. It’s also next to impossible (unless with a lot of work mind you) to see trends, determine influential sites, uncover potential issues popping up, compare share of online voice vs. competitors etc… with the manual methods. Again we’d love to connect when your ready to find out more. Cheers.
David Alston
Radian6
April 10th, 2008 at 1:24 am
Kelly - Radian6 has a pretty robust product. You should check it out.
- Michael
April 12th, 2008 at 3:00 am
Monitoring social media and traditional media are two completely different things. My company is a traditional media monitoring service, we monitor newspaper, television, and radio. Many of my clients are also now looking for resources for monitoring online buzz as well. But these are really two different animals. First of all the traditional media is “produced” by an editor, by the few for the many, where as social media is produced by the many, for the many. Second, the reach of traditional media is still far more than the reach of social media. Third, not everything that is in the newspaper is online for example only 40% of newspaper have websites, and of that 40% they only have 40% of the content online. What is often excluded are ads, classifieds, legal notices, obituaries, regional inserts, sports box scores, and several other things that are important to traditional newspaper readers. We get so engrossed in the online community, that we think that everyone is online, but I say nay nay, you got to remember all of the bubbas that don’t get online, and all of the people who still have dial up, and all of the people who just don’t read blogs. Traditional media, far outweighs the reach of blogs, and will for predictably another 10 years or so. Companies like Radian6, Infegy, and a handful of other social media monitoring services have this down to a science. Measuring online buzz is important to those industries that depend heavily upon the online community for sales, support, clientèle, and discussion to bolster their products and services. You can read more about my thoughts about news media monitoring at my blog http://newsmediamonitoring.blogspot.com/
Dred Porter magnoliaclips.com