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social media monitoring
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Getting in the Game: What PR Pros Need to Know About Social Media Monitoring
24 Jul 2009 by pwoodford / No Comments
It’s no secret the PR and marketing industries are rapidly changing with the proliferation of social media and networking sites. With this change come opportunities as well as challenges that we, as PR professionals, are embracing.While some businesses (and industries) still approach social media, Twitter, and the blogosphere with reservation and sometimes trepidation (just think Mommy bloggers and the headache over the Motrin ad controversy), these outlets and forums are actually terrific ways to gauge customer interest, satisfaction, and engage with target audiences closely.
And now, Forrester Research is out with its Interactive Marketing Forecast for the next five years, confirming the growth and monetary backing we can expect to see in social media marketing. Forrester is estimating social media marketing to grow at an annual rate of 34 percent – faster than any other form of online marketing and double the average growth rate of 17 percent for all online mediums.
With this burgeoning interest comes the need to understand the impact of all this money being spent on social media marketing. Did the messages resonate? Were consumers and customers engaged? Excited? Or even angry? With so much opportunity to engage with the “right” audiences online and so much information being published, businesses are having a tough time grasping the real information from the fleeting comments.
This is where social media monitoring technologies, like Lexalytics (one of our clients at PAN), comes in. These technologies can help companies ensure that their business’ reputation isn’t in jeopardy because of what is being written online. And now these technologies can be easily integrated with PR and marketing campaigns to measure success – and areas for improvement.
This technology, which is more accurate and comprehensive than human analysis, can help businesses analyze blog and Twitter content, etiquette for responding to stories, and how to best leverage the information that is already out there. Because human analysis is still essential to the process, the technology is enhancing it and allowing PR and marketing pros to decipher the areas for improvement as well as outreach faster, with more accuracy, and with greater analysis.
Within online networks and communities are individuals who will not all feel exactly the same way, so having the ability to extract meaning from all the noise — especially in a crisis situation — and measure extremes of opinion makes a critical difference in important business decisions. After all, being equipped with information and analysis about what sentiment is living inside tweets, blog posts, and more, is crucial in being able to make sense of all the feedback and live conversations.
And this isn’t just for crisis situations. Being able to determine what areas of market education might be lacking in one area will help companies proactively engage with the right audiences to share information and interact.
As we become a nation of over 20 million bloggers, social media enthusiasts, and citizen journalists, being able to make sense of all the information and online engagement will quickly become a bigger task than human tracking and analysis can handle, so being equipped with the know-how and technology to bring this task down to size for PR and marketing purposes will quickly become most important.
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