Social Media Monitoring

The early 90s didn't have as many options for going viral compared to today but in 1992 Snapple found out that not paying attention to customer conversations can be very damaging to business. Snapple initially tried to quell these rumors quietly, but eventually had to launch a media campaign to squash them, pointing out it would be bad for business to support controversial issues in such a way as the rumors implied.

Over the last few days, the internet and media was abuzz with the news about Dominos Pizza. Two Domino’s Pizza employees filmed a prank in the restaurant’s kitchen and decided to post it online. It didn’t take long for the viral power of social media to kick in and result in more than a million viewers view the videos. This is the kind of public relations nightmare that any retailer dreads.

Installing cameras seems like an obvious answer to thwarting a repeat of the incident. However, the real threat is in the snowballing of issues on the internet by not addressing it quickly enough before it goes out of hand. I think that social media monitoring should an important focus for any organization.

Social Media Monitoring can be as simple as using search engines to searching for keywords using complex social media monitoring tools. One of the simplest social media monitoring tools that I have implemented is to use a web part on our team portal site that shows a continuous feed of search results and twitter feeds with specific keywords. This information is available to anyone that visits the portal site and they can choose to respond to any of the tweets when they see something that requires attention. Here is a post that talks about the simple things that a company can do to monitor their social media presence in ten minutes a day: https://bit.ly/zvZLd

There are also several tools that you can use for monitoring and protecting your reputation on the internet. One such tool is Trackur, an online reputation monitoring tool designed to assist you in tracking what is said about you on the internet. Trackur scans web pages--including news, blogs, video, images, and forums--and lets you know if it discovers anything that matches the keywords that interest you. Another example is Visible Technologies that provides brands, including Microsoft, Panasonic and Hormel, the ability to bolster brand reputation, build revenue and measure the success of social media engagement. The company's TruCast®2.0 social media monitoring and engagement platform launched in May 2008. Radian6 seems to be a popular solution for engaging with social media.

Here is a list of some excellent tools for managing your online reputation:

· Social Mention is a social media search engine that searches user-generated content such as blogs, comments, bookmarks, events, news, videos, and microblogging services.

· BlogPulse from Nielsen Online. BlogPulse is an automated trend discovery system for blogs.

· Trendpedia finds the articles online that talk about your topics. Trendpedia organizes the articles in a trendline that shows the popularity of the topic over time — you can track a topic’s trendline from three months ago up to today