ImpactWatch Blog

With everyone on vacation this month, there hasn’t been a lot to read. Here’s the best of August:

• 10 Steps for Successful Social Media Monitoring – Mashable

• Social Media ROI – is this the measurement framework we’ve been waiting for? – Smart Insights

• The 10/90 Rule for Social Media – Sysomos

• Ethics in PR Measurement – Philip Sheldrake

• The etiquette of eavesdropping – Research Magazine

• Rethinking the Value of Social Media: Measurement – WebWorkerDaily

• From WTF To KPI: PR Measurement In Acronyms – Shonali Burke

• Choosing Goals for Social Media – Amber Naslund

• Customized Social Media Metrics Are Important to Measurement – Spiral16

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See Last Week’s Top Posts

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photo: Mark Strozier

1. You don’t feel like a sitting duck.

One of the giant benefits of social media is the opportunity to get “out there”, you know, “with the people.” Social media coverage is an invaluable source of sentiment data so you can track consumer feelings about your product and head off any problems before they snowball. Social media monitoring means that you don’t have to wait until sales are affected to find out about changes in your market.

2. You know what you’re doing.

With solid media metrics, you will have a foundation for your marketing ideas. You can figure out what is working with your audience and do more of that. Archiving and monitoring over time provide trend data that shows where your efforts have been and helps you figure out where they should be going. If you just monitor sporadically for your one-day “push,” you won’t have a baseline to compare your initiative to and you’ll miss all the good stuff the market is trying to tell you even when you’re not bombarding it with messages.

3. You know what your competitors are doing.

With social media, it’s all out there. You can monitor your industry and competitor coverage just like you monitor your own brand. Is your competitor hiring 10 programmers all of a sudden? They’re up to something. Are dozens of tweeters complaining about your partner company’s customer service? Might be time to cut that cord. Your brand name isn’t the only one that affects your bottom line.

4. You’re not chasing back coverage.

Part of successful media monitoring is anticipating how people will talk about you. Let’s say I’m monitoring my social media coverage and I’m tracking “Hannah Del Porto” and “@handels.” Bases covered, right? Well, right up until Ben & Jerry’s releases a delicious flavor, aptly named “Hannah Banana,” in my honor.

I can’t just sit back and assume that anyone who talks about my flavor will also mention my full name or twitter handle. I have to be watching for developments related to my brand (a lot of these are internal, guys, so it’s not really a challenge) and change my keywords so the coverage comes to me instead of having to chase it down after the fact. This means I’m ready with immediate metrics and the ability to produce a report for that last minute meeting (likely about why the hell I have an ice cream named after me).

5. Your monitoring program is not an island.

A good media program costs money. You either paid for some kind of fancy software or you have an army of analysts locked in the basement wading through your media mentions. Either way, to get the most out of your investment, you have to integrate the results with your business activities. Customer service complaint via Twitter? Let your account managers in on it. Blog about 10 improvements that should be made in your industry? Forward it to product development. If you only have your PR/comm people seeing this information, you are missing out on a lot of your monitoring program’s value.

How do you know if your monitoring program is a success? Are you wringing out every drop of valuable information?

photo: visual.dichotomy

ImpactWatch now displays a real-time feed of custom filtered tweets right on your dashboard.

Based on Slurp140 technology, the new Twitter stream updates automatically to display new tweets, a leaderboard of most frequent tweeters, and stats on your tweets over time.

Best of all, you can instantly reply to or retweet any mention right from your tweet stream!

The new Twitter tool complements ImpactWatch’s existing range of feed sources which includes print, online or broadcast news, and social media sources. Depending on your monitoring and measurement needs we can customize your platform with the sources that are important to you.

Graphs and statistics also update in real-time on the Dashboard page, so you can see the who, when and what of your Twitter coverage.

We have a lot of features on the way in the coming weeks, so keep an eye out for more. Sign up for a Demo Account now to check it out!

• The most discouraging news of the week for PR – Katie Paine  and PR Measurement Principle Three: What Counts? – Intelitecht

• 7 Reasons Social Media Is Bad for Marketing – Hubspot

• Crafting a Social Media Plan – Even If It Is Off Target – Marketing Vox

• SMART Social Media ROI: Show me the Money! – Search Engine Watch

• Successful social media analytics requires commitment, experimentation – SearchCRM.com

This week was the first meeting of the #smmeasure chat on Twitter to discuss social media monitoring and measurement. I think it takes time to build a community for these discussions (hey, that sounds like marketing advice) so with about 80 participants, #smmeasure is off to a good start.

Although it can be difficult to join week after week, I think that Twitter chats are really quite brilliant. They enable topical discussions with no travel, no tickets, no credentials. Unlike an industry conference where the few speak to the many, Twitter chats gives novices, students and consumers the ability to jump right and voice their opinions to the experts. It can often be an unparalleled opportunity to learn from people you would rarely get a chance to speak with otherwise.

I’ve enjoyed the weekly #socialmedia chat (Tuesdays, 12pm EST) for some time. The topic can be almost anything related to professional social media use and the guest moderators are usually pretty awesome. The new #smmeasure chat will be Thursdays at 12pm EST (doesn’t anyone eat lunch anymore?). There is also a bi-weekly #measurepr chat for the intersection of PR and social media which takes place every other Tuesday. Yes, also at 12pm EST.

Are there any other twitter chats that discuss social media monitoring and measurement? I still have a few lunch hours free. (SMMM, delicious!)

Hannah

-Photo: Marc Smith

• Social Media Shell Game: What Do Those Followers, Fan Numbers Really Mean? – Marketing Vox

• How savvy firms monitor customers’ online chatter – Computerworld

• Social media monitoring: time to say ’sod it’? – Econsultancy

• Just Say No to AVEs – Katie Paine

• Vendors push social media analytics, but some question the technology’s readiness – SearchCRM

• 6 Crucial Social Media Tips for Traditional Media – Mashable

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SEE LAST WEEKS TOP POSTS

A few goodies for the week:

• Social Media Monitoring Tools – How to Pick The Right One – Convince & Convert

• Social Media Monitoring software is a commodity – CustomerThink

• 12 Critical Keywords Every Company Should Monitor in Social Media – Trackur

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SEE LAST WEEK’S TOP POSTS

• Top Five Social Media Marketing Mistakes – BusinessWeek

• How to Audit Your Social Media Efforts: 20+ Questions to Ask Yourself – Sociatic

• Social Media Monitoring Tools Exposed – The Viral Muse

• If you only do one thing in Social Media, it ought to be SOCIAL MEDIA MONITORING. – PR Squared

• Matrix: Brand Monitoring, Social Analytics, Social Insights – Jeremiah Owyang

• Manage Your Online Reputation—Before Someone Else Does - Wall Street Journal

• My Feelings About Sentiment Analysis – Intelligent Enterprise

• European PR measurement summit – really? – Liberate Media

• Measuring Social Media’s Impact on the Bottom Line – Winning Business

• Crack isn’t just a waste of time. It’s bad for you too – BrandNet  I thought this headline was funny and went to check it out. Turns out it was actually relevant.

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SEE LAST WEEK’S TOP POSTS OF THE WEEK

Slow week, but I’m working on the Top Posts of the Year from the past 52 Top Posts of the Week lists. Please add a comment with anything that I missed. Also, Dear Mark Evans, please stop cranking out amazing blog posts every day. It is making the rest of us look bad :)

• How Much Does Social Media Cost? – Sysomos

• The Barcelona Prinicples of Measurement – Katie Paine

• First global standard of proving value of PR created at European Summit on Measurement – PR Week

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SEE LAST WEEK’S TOP POSTS

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Follow Hannah Banana on Twitter (if that is her real name).

Follow ImpactWatch on Twitter.

• Three ways to act on your social media monitoring – Social Media Today

• 52 Questions To Ask When Hiring A Social Media Company – Outspoken Media

• Six real ways to measure social media – Meme Burn

• How ‘BT Sarah’ spies on your Facebook account – Daily Mail. [The Daily Mail is often silly-bazilly but this is clearly meant to alarm readers who are less web-savvy. I propose higher webucation.]

• Revolutionizing Corporate Communication: 6 Tips for Integrating Social Media – Huffington Post

• What if Social Media Isn’t Working? Then What? – Sysomos

• 5 Questions You Need to Ask Yourself When Creating a Social Media Report Template – Lauren Fernandez

• PR measurement was never meant to be an exclusive club – Rebecca Denison

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SEE LAST WEEK’S TOP POSTS

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Follow Hannah on Twitter.

Follow ImpactWatch on Twitter.

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Photo: Bluedharma