Listening 101: Social Media Monitoring

8/14/2019 Listening 101: Social Media Monitoring

1/8

Tips to integrate social media

into your day-to-day media monitoring

Listening 101

white paperdna13.com


2/8

Take a flying leap

With Web 2.0 here to stay, many companies small and large are still coming to

grips with how to take the first critical steps towards active participation in the world

of consumer-driven media.The prospect of implementing a social media strategy for your company may seem daunting, but its not as

difficult as you think. In fact, taking your place in the Web 2.0 universe can be as simple as listening.

Millions of conversationsWeb 2.0 is not a concept anymore; its reality. A power shift has taken place. Traditional print and television media

no longer have exclusive control over how and when your message is delivered. Consumer communities using

web-based social media tools are talking about your brand reputation. The evidence speaks for itself very loudly.

Social networking sites are growing exponentially. Facebook has more than 300 million active users globally,with each user having an average of 130 friends1 . Earlier this year, YouTube reached 147 million users in the

U.S., and the average number of videos viewed per person reached 1012. Microblogging sites like Twitter have

anywhere from 3.5 million to 17 million users, depending on which site you look at, and nobodys even counting

how many blogs exist globally anymore, but there are well over 100 million. To add to all of that, there are

countless discussion forums, where people are offering opinions on just about anything they read, see or hear.

Combine all of this with traditional media the daily newspaper, network television, and radio and you have a

dizzying number of channels where conversations impacting your brand reputation are almost certainly taking place.

As your companys PR professional, youre responsible for keeping the proverbial ear to the ground on whats

being said about you. Given todays reality, are you covering all your bases? Are you ready if todays simple

tweet becomes tomorrows news headline? If not, whats stopping you?

Not enough time or resources?

Cant get buy-in from senior management?

Dont know how or where to begin?

Shhh listenIt is critical for your company to be plugged into the conversations taking place about your brand.

Stumbling accidentally onto a conversation about your company can make your blood run cold. If the

conversation is positive, you heave a sigh of relief. If it isnt, you can spiral into full-on panic mode.

2 Listening 101: Tips to integrate social media into your day-to-day media monitoring

1 http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics

2 http://youtubereport2009.com/youtube-reache-100-million-us-viewers/
http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statisticshttp://youtubereport2009.com/youtube-reache-100-million-us-viewers/http://youtubereport2009.com/youtube-reache-100-million-us-viewers/http://youtubereport2009.com/youtube-reache-100-million-us-viewers/http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statisticshttp://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics


3/8

The bottom line for every PR practitioner is control. You plan carefully for

every good headline and every potential disaster. You plant your message,

and manage it through to its natural conclusion. But how do you do it in

todays Web 2.0 environment without taking your organization too far

outside its comfort zone impacting time, resources, and brand control?

The answer is simple: take the first step start by listening.

When you listen, you learn:

Your brand is out there and people are talking about it

Your competitor is already in the game, or if not, people are talkingabout them too

Some of your employees are already representing you online, and you didnt know it

There is a whole new world of opportunity for engaging with and responding to your customers

Listening toolsListening is something good communicators, PR experts and marketers always do before proposing a course of

action. Traditionally, strategies start with interviews, focus groups, a review of customer-focused literature, a

SWOT analysis or other research that gets a pulse on their companys reputation.

Listening in on the social media universe is no different.

You can make a low-risk and low-investment start by using free web-based tools to tap into whos discussing

your brand and why. Using a combination of free and paid tools can become overwhelming due to the volume of

data and the numerous locations in which it's being stored. The end result (media monitoring data points spread

across multiple platforms and Excel spreadsheets) should help provide justification as to why moving to a fullyintegrated listening platform is such a worthwhile investment in the longer term.

67% of executive

marketers consider

themselves beginners

when it comes to usingsocial media for

marketing purposes.

Marketing ExecutivesNetworking Group, Nov 2008

Why listen?

There is always someone talking about you somewhere

Online conversations happen in real-time, and so should your responses

To get a pulse on your companys current online reputation and presence

To help you know how and how much you need to get involved in monitoring social media

Not knowing is not an option

Listening 101: Tips to integrate social media into your day-to-day media monitoring 3


4/8

Making your caseStrategic planning that includes monitoring social media and traditional

channels alike is an investment, but one that will ultimately drive your

companys costs down, while at the same time providing peace of mind

that you are staying on top of all conversations surrounding your brand.

Corporate communications, PR, and marketing all three are cost

centers, not profit centers. You know how tough it is to defend every

budget dollar. Equally challenging is building a case for monitoring social

media in a corporate setting that may still have one foot stuck in the past,

and is concerned only with daily newspaper or television news coverage.

By demonstrating how you and your competitors brands are being discussed online, youll build your case for

investing in a listening and engagement media strategy. You might discover no one is talking about you yet. That

may not be a bad thing it means that the power is in your hands to get a conversation started.

In a January 2009 AdMedia Partners survey of marketers worldwide, 77% expected to increase their social

media marketing, with only 11% predicting a decrease. Social media marketing was the highest ranked increase

of any marketing spending, including search and mobile marketing.

Make a plan make it happenOnce you get buy-in for a social media strategy, the place to begin is the same place you begin for traditional

communication strategies planning.

1. Research

Free web-based listening tools are a good place to start if youre just becoming acquainted with the social media

world, but a more sophisticated approach to managing and reporting on the conversations will be needed once

dialogue takes off and becomes more numerous.

There are reputable web-based applications that understand corporate communications, PR and marketing and

will consolidate and present all the news coverage and consumer generated coverage data for you.

Your initial investment

Research and training Initial listening exercise

Meetings and discussions

Strategy development

and planning

What to watch for when analyzing your monitoring data:

Which channels contain the most buzz?

Whats being said?

Does the person talking about your brand have influence over your target audience?

What data points are most important to you when it comes to reporting on brand conversations?

Ask the same questions for your top competitors.



5/8

2. Strategize

With any outreach effort, understanding what moves, motivates and irks your target audience is critical.

Listening helps do this.

Communications outreach planning including social media engagement planning also has to contribute tomeeting a companys bottom line objectives. If your company is not already using its website to engage

stakeholders, the initial strategy can start small.

Set up a Twitter account follow individuals or companies with successful social media engagement tosee what they are doing.

Read the blogs of your thought leaders figure out who is influential in your space and read what theyresaying. They will be a great resource for coming up with new content ideas for your own materials whenyou begin to engage.

If you have already begun to engage in social media outreach:

Find ways to provide your blog with more exposure, such as posting useful comments to others blogs, andincluding links back to your own.

Integrate technologies onto your blog and website that encourage that sharing of your content, such associal bookmarking widgets.

Publish content frequently, so your audience has a reason to keep coming back for more.

Optimize your blog posts with key phrases related to your topic, to help generate new traffic from searchengines.

Use social media to drive traffic to your content. Try feeding your blog posts to Twitter via RSS, or usingsocial media releases to encourage commenting and sharing of your materials.

Change in Online Marketing Spending in 2009 According to Senior Marketing Executives World

Word-of-mouth

Search Marketing

Mobile Marketing

Behavioral/contextual marketing

Lead generation

CRM/analytics

Video advertising

E-mail marketing

Online gaming/in-game advertising

Online media buying/planning

Affiliate marketing

Web development

Market research

Display advertising

0 150

45

23

23

19

13

18

11

16

9

9

7

11

7

11

29

50

38

35

40

30

31

24

31

9

22

14

18

12

26

27

39

46

47

51

58

60

60

63

70

75

76

77 Increase (%)

Flat (%)

Decrease (%)

Note: numbers may not add up

to 100% due to rounding

Source: Ad Media Partners,

January 2009



6/8

3. Organize

Most of your companys effort to move from a mass communication model to a social engagement model is

cultural. The whole company has to get behind how social media contributions will be managed and organized.

Web strategist and social media guru, Jeremiah Owyang, advocates a hub and spoke model, whererepresentatives from all areas of the business mobilize to manage social media interactions (the hub)

together3. This cross-functional team shares resources and cross-functional communication (the spokes) with

those at the edge of the organization (the tire).

Regardless of the social media engagement model you choose, anyone participating in social media activities

particularly those who will be posting responses must be clear on their guidelines for interaction.

4. Prepare

If your company doesnt already have employee guidelines for its online activities, it should be a priority. Good

models of social media policies include IBMs Social Computing Guidelines4 and the Red Cross Social Media

Handbook5.

Tips for preparing social engagement guidelines:

Determine how employees will engage online do they represent themselves or the company?

Identify the span of control employees will have over what they can say/do to respond to online concerns

Create a process for sharing corporate messaging to ensure consistency in message delivery

Develop an escalation process to quickly manage challenging issues

5. Jump in

The key to getting started is with an understanding you dont have to be everywhere at once. Here are five simple

ways to ease into the vast social media setting:

1. Start tweeting. Set up filters for posts relevant to your company, products, or your competitors, and start

engaging in the conversation. Consider re-tweeting any of the interesting articles and facts that you are

finding from your thought leaders and influencers, and add in anything else that you think people might

find of interest.

2. Read two or three relevant blogs on a regular basis, and leave your own comments on interesting posts.

By commenting regularly, you will establish a profile for yourself with both influential bloggers, andtheir followers.


3 http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2009/06/25/report-companies-should-organize-for-social-media-in-hub-and-spoke/

4 http://www.ibm.com/blogs/zz/en/guidelines.html

5 http://sites.google.com/site/wharman/social-media-strategy-handbook
http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2009/06/25/report-companies-should-organize-for-social-media-in-hub-and-spoke/http://www.ibm.com/blogs/zz/en/guidelines.htmlhttp://sites.google.com/site/wharman/social-media-strategy-handbookhttp://sites.google.com/site/wharman/social-media-strategy-handbookhttp://sites.google.com/site/wharman/social-media-strategy-handbookhttp://www.ibm.com/blogs/zz/en/guidelines.htmlhttp://www.ibm.com/blogs/zz/en/guidelines.htmlhttp://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2009/06/25/report-companies-should-organize-for-social-media-in-hub-and-spoke/http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2009/06/25/report-companies-should-organize-for-social-media-in-hub-and-spoke/


7/8

3. Make your companys website more social. Ensure there are sharing options on the relevant pages of your

site. Create a comments section below news releases or posted news items and make your media room

more social and interactive.

4. Start your own blog. As youre getting started, develop an editorial calendar and a list of bloggable ideas.

Planning is important when you are getting started and short for ideas, as a blog is only successful if it

contains information that others find relevant and interesting. Successful blogging tips are easy to find online.

5. Listen every day and stay involved. All it takes is 15 minutes a day.

6. Measure

Measuring your communication activities is

critical, yet challenging. Measuring ROI

with social media engagement can also be

a tricky proposition, with no set standard

yet developed.

To get started, begin by identifying whats

important to your business:

Qualitative metrics - Conversations,corporate reputation or customersatisfaction

Quantitative metrics - Online buzz,web traffic, or search engine ranking

If the objective is to measure the ROI of conversations, you should model your engagement strategy to be able to

answer questions like:

Are we proactively contributing to conversations relevant to our business?

Are we initiating discussions on issues our prospects care about?

How are we being talked about in comparison to our competitors?

Are we building better relationships with our customers?

Are we moving from a providing a running monologue to engaging in meaningful dialogue?

Quantitative metrics are also helpful in identifying the impact of your online engagement efforts.

Number of blog visitors, both unique and returning

Number of comments that your blog posts are generating

Number of Twitter followers and friends that you have acquired

Number of social bookmarks generated by your content

Search engine ranking

Fortunately, there are tools to help accurately track and manage improvements in such metrics. Marketing and

PR professionals now have access to a plethora of web-based applications in their measurement tool box, both

free and paid.

Which platform will figure into your marketing

plans the most in the coming months?

Twitter

Facebook

LinkedIn

Other

0 12.5 25.0 37.5 50.0

8.7

16.5

26.2

40.8

Percent Source: Anderson Analytics, July 2009



8/8

Some of the recommended tools include:

Media monitoring: dna13 for print, TV, online and social media monitoring, and Google alerts for onlinemonitoring

Blog and website analytics: Hubspot.com and Google Analytics

Twitter management: Salesforce.com to track tweets and assign internally to other departments, andTweetBeep.com for alerts

Harness the powerFor companies who still only monitor traditional media, listening to what is being said across multiple media

channels will be a revelation not just for communications and marketing professionals, but for sales and

customer service representatives, and for the c-suite. The numbers dont lie; a spike in conversation either

means a crisis is looming or your product launch has been successful and the buzz is validating it.

In either case, you will be able to see in real-time, how consumers, influencers, and the media, feel about your

company. This information is something that every communications professional can use to improve thecompanys bottom-line performance on a daily basis.

With the information in your hands, you can plan and develop or adjust strategies based on what real people

need and want.

Only then will you have harvested the true power of social media.


About dna13dna13 is the leading SaaS solution for reputation management and

media monitoring. Providing complete visibility into globalreputation, dna13 enables communicators to listen to what is being

said about their company in print, major market TV, online and social

media, securely align team members to ensure accuracy in

corporate messaging, and engage with stakeholders and influencers

to develop and nurture valuable relationships.

2009 dna13 Inc.

All Rights Reserved Worldwide.

dna13.com| [email protected]

866.842.1723
http://www.dna13.com/http://www.dna13.com/mailto:[email protected]:[email protected]:[email protected]:[email protected]:[email protected]:[email protected]://www.dna13.com/http://www.dna13.com/

Documents

Listening 101: Social Media Monitoring