Media monitoring (both traditional, new and social media sources) is a critically important part of Communications/PR and IR. Online media in particular is a rapidly changing landscape and with such volumes of information it is difficult for those tasked with monitoring media to know how to most effectively use their time across monitoring, analysis and reporting back to management.
Tools are now emerging that bring content to you in an effective and aggregated product with no noise, allowing you to spend much more time on the analysis and adding value from insights and tactics that come out of this analysis.
I recently interviewed David Alston of Radian6. I was keen to do this interview with Radian 6 (who are in my opinion currently the best provider) to really try to demystify media monitoring as it is right now, not as it was five, even two years ago.
I have noticed that so much has changed and many businesses are stuck with old processes and approaches for keeping on top of what is being said about them which is quite frankly just a waste of money and time. Even worse, they are not monitoring some of those most important areas, where true customer and stakeholder conversations are taking place, offering critically valuable insights to help them do what they do better.
Organizational approach to media monitoring has to be regularly assessed against a set of performance metrics and approach has to change regularly as new sources of media spring up and as some disappear.
From Radian6:
“Millions of blog posts. Viral videos. Reviews in forums. Sharing of photos. Status updates via microblogging. All social media conversations, all happening online right now and affecting brands, reputations, sales, you name it. It is game changing. It is distributed. It is in the hands of users and communities. And if you are a PR or advertising professional it’s your responsibility to manage it. But how?”
Me: Describe in a Twitter post what Radian6 is all about. Then 3 reasons why we should follow you on Twitter!
David Alston: OK, here I go in 140 characters or less - “Helps companies listen/engage in social media. 3 Reasons to follow are: interest in social media, sharing new ideas & conversation”
Me: Previously Media/Comms team only had press clippings from mainstream media outlets to monitor positive or negative impact on their business and the environment it operates in. Now with emergence of Blogs, Social Networks there are a host of new channels where extra information and comment about companies is not only published, but ongoing conversations are held with no geographic boundaries and in many cases no moderation (pretty much no control for companies). How do the benefits of these new channels balance with the drawbacks?
David Alston: Well I guess I would start by saying that I don’t think companies ever did control the message. They had a voice and could contribute ideas to a story but it has always been up to the author to sculpt it the way they wanted. What I like about user generated content is that the authors are accessible and generally want to start a conversation with each post they put up. So while it’s great to at least be listening to both traditional and UGC content channels I believe it’s even more important to be engaging and to become part of the communities your brand belongs to. In the end people want to connect with people, not a faceless or masked brand. Listening for mentions and reaching out via social media provides such a wonderful opportunity for any brand to build relationships, and to me, that’s what it’s all about.
Me: What are the two greatest benefits of new media channels and the two greatest drawbacks from a corporate perspective?
David Alston:
Benefits
1. Ability to learn so much from your community (which includes customers, potential customers, competitors, influencers, critics, etc..)
2. The opportunity to build relationships that combined with a remarkable product or service offering from a company can help build and sustain any business through genuine word-of-mouth.
Challenges
1. Listening and engaging requires a company to invest in people resources – people that love helping others solve problems and are willing to live out in the community.
2. Companies need to embrace social media and make it core to how they do business. If they see social media as this small percentage expense item that they add on to their marketing budget then they are truly missing out on the power. You don’t buy social media you “be it”. This means a company’s culture needs to embrace the concepts of transparency, accessibility, community participation, sharing, collaboration, constant connecting and conversation. It means everyone in the organization lives “how can I help you” in all their roles. For some companies social media plugs right in and becomes a natural extension of what they already believe. For others, to embrace social media means a major transformation.
Me: If you HAD to choose monitoring either mainstream media or social media for content related to a business you were running which would you choose and why?
David Alston: Well, I would probably do both because they both play a key role. But if you forced me to pick only one I would pick social media (and that’s not just because I’m a bit biased :). I view the definition of “brand” as the “sum of all conversations”. With social media, all of these conversations are public and cached forever on search engines like Google. Being able to add your voice to the conversations that happen around these posts is important if you believe in this definition. Knowing where the discussions are happening in real-time is thus key to being able to pinpoint where you need to focus your efforts.
Me: Is it actually possible for a business to stay on top of everything that is said about them online? How close can you get?
David Alston: Yes, it is possible to listen for brand mentions, competitor mentions and customer needs mentions across all forms of social media in real-time. Clients like Dell are using our platform and treating social media just like any other channel for customers to reach out and connect with them. Listening and engaging in social media should be treated no different than phone calls, emails, customer visits etc… Customers have questions, needs, concerns, opinions, thank yous etc..that they are sharing online for everyone, including your brand, to hear. The vast majority of the time they are more than thrilled when you “answer the social phone” and help them out.
Me: How much resource (daily, weekly monthly) is needed for the most effective media monitoring and who is the most logical person in a business to do undertake this?
David Alston: I guess it would depend on the volume of conversation on the brand and it’s category and how much you want to become part of the community. Keep in mind, that the goal of every brand should be to grow the amount of conversation about their brand online and often the best way to do this is to start with listening and engaging (combined with a product/service that very much resonates with that community). Generally, listening only can be done internally or with an agency partner. Engaging should be done internally or if externally than with a partner that clearly discloses they are acting on a brand’s behalf. Internal resources can come from customer service, PR or marketing generally. They need to have that “how can I help you” culture build into them and a willingness to be open& transparent. They should also have solid connections throughout the company so they can easily draw on help from other resources when they need it.
Me: What products/reports should someone monitoring media (both mainstream and online/social) for a company deliver to the CEO/management and at what frequency? Also, who in organization should be seeing media related to the company, everyone? Management? Those whose business line the media relates to?
David Alston: Well, ideally in a social media infused company all levels and departments would be active in a company’s community. As posts are found they are assigned to the folks with the expertise to absorb the content and respond if appropriate. Posts are tagged, categorized and tracked to ensure nothing falls through the cracks. Think of how a call center would manage, route, track and report on calls daily, weekly and monthly – same thing should be happening with social media. As for reports specifically, the management team could look at the share of conversation they have online vs. competitors on a monthly basis. They could look at how many conversations lead to a sales engagement vs. how many were customer complains (and whether they were resolved). If a new product was launched using a campaign, conversational buzz can be tracked before, during and after the launch to determine how much of an impact it had. Social media is highly measurable, and as such provides companies with an excellent real-time or periodic pulse on how they are doing.
Me: Are there any media monitoring metrics that can be looked to/assessed so that the ROI of paying for a product like Radian6 can be evidenced?
David Alston: Sure, if it happens online and it’s driven by links then anything can be tracked – which provides a complete formula to determine ROI. At the same time, listening and engaging activity can also be tagged and categorized to determine outcomes or possible outcomes.
Me: How does Radian6 give a better result than accessing free tools e.g. Google Alerts?
David Alston: I’ll point out first that it’s so important for companies to be listening and engaging. Even if they start by using a collection of free tools and manual searches at least they’ve begun and that’s the most important part.
And on this I would compare this collection of free/manual stuff with getting a single phone for a business versus setting up a phone switch with multiple phones/calling features or call center environment. A single phone is a place to start and for many small businesses it may be all that they ever need. But for medium/large or growing businesses they quickly outgrow it and need to come up with something more efficient and effective.
Radian6’s platform does a number of things manual searches/free alerts don’t:
- We track all forms of social media for you including blogs, video & image sharing sites, forums, boards, microblogging (Twitter, Friendfeed) and online mainstream news. And we track it in near real-time so you can quickly join conversations in progress if you feel the need or manage a crisis that might be erupting.
- We capture conversational dynamics on every item so you can sort through thousands of conversations by comment count, votes, engagement etc… This can help you pinpoint the conversations where the crowds are forming for instance.
- We enable companies to analyze the data they’ve captured in multiple ways across posts and custom timeframes using graphs, word clouds, etc… This allows companies to look for trends, see impacts, compare against competitors, etc..
- We are able to analyze all posts on a customer’s topic to uncover who the most influential sites are and who they are connected to.
- We allow an entire company to assign incoming posts to the various team experts and allow them to be tracked, tagged, sorted, and managed so that no incoming “social phone call” is not acted on.
Me: Is it difficult to continually evolve your product as new technologies and online media channels emerge? How do customers know all bases are covered?
David Alston: We’re fortunate to have a great team here at Radian6 focused on innovating and covering those basis’. We release new features to our subscribers each month which include coverage of new channels, new analysis tools, and new ways of collaborating. The fact that we offer our solution as a SaaS (software as a service) model means that a subscriber doesn’t need to worry about upgrades – they simply sign in each day and new features appear when we role them out. We are also fortunate to have a great user base that shares what they need from us on a continual basis and we are more than happy to see if we can enhance the product to help them.
Me: What changes in the media monitoring space and what never will?
David Alston: Social media monitoring is similar to traditional media monitoring in that it allows a company to listen to what’s being said about them online. However, because social media is about relationships and conversation I expect to see the space continue to evolve away from the comparison. Monitoring listening is just step one in a process that can see a company transform how it interacts and engages with it’s customers and community. Some companies many never see this opportunity. Those that do will rediscover the old saying – when given a choice customers will choose to deal with people they like – and you can’t get to like someone if you never get a chance to build a relationship with them.