Online News Monitoring, and Broadcast Monitoring for TV and Radio News, I describe the various approaches to news monitoring. The social web is a fast-growing and fast-changing “platform” for consumers to discuss companies and products. Social media monitoring is the process of listening to online consumer reviews and conversations about your company, its brands and services. The overarching goal of social media monitoring is to learn from listening - better understand consumer concerns about your organization, and then employ that knowledge to enhance your products and services. Your social media listening strategy should encompass all forms of word of mouth media and consumer discussion including but not limited to blogs, “complaint” sites, message boards, forums, Usenet news groups, and video sharing sites such as YouTube. Facebook, MySpace and Linked-In, along with Twitter, the microblog. Social media monitoring services monitor all forms of social media - but not all services monitor all media.
Leading Social Networking Sites
Since it’s impossible to predict where or when important market intelligence will “pop up” on the Web; or where it will be repeated or “go viral”, it’s best to monitor the widest possible range of social media. Social media overflows with inane chatter. If the Chipotle restaurant chain monitors social media, the overwhelming majority of mentions will be about “going to” the restaurant or “meeting (name)” at the restaurant - not very useful for market intelligence purposes. Well-constructed search queries help minimize extraneous chatter. As an example, McDonald’s could focus social media monitoring on specific product names (brands) instead of the corporate name. Or it could use an “and not” operator in the Boolean query on common phrases like “going to” or “meet”. That type of clip avoidance strategy will likely delete a bit of worthwhile conversation, but will certainly minimize useless chatter to be reviewed. In using social media monitoring as a customer service tool, it’s important to review all mentions of company and brand names to identify and act on complaints (and compliments).
What should you be listening for? As a starting point, monitor for your corporate name, your brands, the services you offer, and the names of key executives. Initially, just start looking for complaints, compliments and questions about your company. Look for any serious issues that need to be corrected. Look for patterns or trends that are emerging - positive or negative. Initially, measurement of social media is not necessary, especially for small and mid-size companies. Later, you may want to expand your listening to encompass competitors and industry-specific issues - and also do some formal measurement of social media conversation. Who in the organization should coordinate the listening? The answer to “who should listen? Is it to find service complaints and rectify them? Then “customer service” should listen and react - often called “engagement” in social media circles. Is the reason to identify issues with product performance? Then marketing or product development should be listening. Is it to monitor corporate reputation?
For blogs, try Technorati, Google Blogs and Ice Rocket.
Then the public relations department should be listening. In large corporations, multiple departments should be involved in the listening process. Using free social media search engines can provide quite a good cross-section of word-of-mouth commentary by consumers on the Web. For blogs, try Technorati, Google Blogs and Ice Rocket. Searching multiple services causes a problem of duplicate content that you’ll need to filter out - something that commercial media monitoring services do automatically. For message boards and forums (which may be even more important to monitor than blogs), 2015 Chinese Social Media try BoardReader which covers about 50,000 different online consumer discussion sites. The best way to start monitoring Facebook and Linked-In is to simply sign up as a member and enter search queries into each service’s search engine. The downside of free search services is the time required to conduct the searches. If you have any kind of concerns regarding where and the best ways to use LoveToKnow, you could call us at our own web-page. It may not be the most productive use of in-house staff. Staff time is better used for analyzing, not searching. If there are a limited number of new posts each day, it may be acceptable to monitor less frequently.
But at least occasional monitoring of social media is crucial to gain a better understanding of consumer issues and to protect your corporate reputation. The paid subscription services for social media monitoring provide more comprehensive coverage, save staff time, and provide many bells & whistles including online clip archives to manage the social media posts, and automated quantitative and qualitative measurement of the posts. Prominent social media monitoring services include Radian6, Alterian M2, Trackur, and Scout Labs. Presently, more than 50 companies compete in the social media monitoring and measurement space. Directory also contains a comprehensive list of social media monitoring services. Many of the well-established news monitoring services provide integrated social media monitoring. YouTube; and all Twitter postings for the previous 24 hours. Social media monitoring services vary considerably in their mission and in their deliverables. In screening the companies, it’s vital to match their market niche with your need. Doing your homework in advance to narrow down your vendor list is absolutely essential. What is the core goal of your service?
Who are your key customers? What internal department is the primary client contact point for your service? What’s your service best at doing? Exactly what social media do you cover? How do you aggregate content? May I add social media of special interest to our company to those your company already monitors? Do you cover “complaint” sites? Do you monitor Twitter? Do you cover and exactly what content do you harvest from Facebook, MySpace, and Linked-In? Is your search engine capable of performing Boolean queries? What Boolean operators does your search engine use? Is it capable of using regular expressions? How many keywords may I use in my queries? Does your service include a searchable archive of social media posts? What are its features? Ask for a demo of the archive. How do you differ from (another service you are evaluating)? Who is your best competitor? Why is your service superior to theirs?
What enhancements do you plan to your service in the next 60 days? Many of the services offer a comprehensive demo or, even better, a “test drive” of the service. That’s unquestionably the best way to sort through the features and benefits of the various vendors. As a new and rapidly evolving media, online consumer discussion and social communities form the “wild west” of monitoring. No solution is perfect. But some social media monitoring is essential for most every company. The temptation is to leap into social media at full speed. “full service” solution of listening, measuring and engagement may not be the best solution to meet your needs. Determining your needs before contacting or meeting with vendors is the most effective way to start the process. With a better idea of what you need, you’re far more able to assess and evaluate media monitoring services - and not buy more than you need.
Content strategy. What is it? Google it and you’ll find a myriad of definitions involving terms like planning, process, phasing, and maybe even aggregation (18 base points in Scrabble). It can be a bit incomprehensible and confusing for the average person. I’m going to try something different and explain content strategy using something equally incomprehensible to the average person: competitive StarCraft tactics. No reason… I just like StarCraft, and I figure the StarCraft and content strategy SEO space probably isn’t hotly contested. My definition of content strategy is making sure that all the content you produce leads towards a singular goal: hitting business objectives and winning games. No fluffy throwaway posts, no cat videos… just posts that are all designed to drive that objective. Follow these tactics and you’ll be on your way to becoming a diamond league content strategist. An early action every StarCraft player does is to move a worker unit out to scout ahead and find your opponent’s main base. You have to know where your opponent is because a 2v2 map is too large a place to stumble around blindly.
Once you know who they are, then you know where they hang out.
Likewise, you need to know roughly who your target audience is for this particular campaign. Narrow it down to an age range (and don’t say 14-65!) and then narrow it down to other demographic details like if they’re blue/white collar, married/single, if they like traveling or playing sci-fi themed RTS video games. Once you know who they are, then you know where they hang out. It could be Facebook Groups, Instagram Stories, or Internet forums… knowing where they are makes it easier for you to focus your marketing efforts in right areas to reach your audience. Now that you know roughly where they are, it’s time to understand who they are and what they’re doing. In StarCraft, you can tell a lot about a player by what is known as their build order — what buildings they prioritize in the early stages of the game. If you see a Protoss player building 4 Warpgates, you know he’s going to rush you with units really quickly. A Zerg player who takes her 3rd hatchery before a spawn pool is focused on building her economy.
In content strategy, understanding your audience is key to developing content that is relevant and compelling to them. This is where having some storytelling skills comes in really handy, because you need get into their minds and figure out what their dramatic need is. A regular teenage student’s dramatic need would be to noticed, fit in and be popular. For a stay-at-home-parent who spends all their time raising a baby, their dramatic need might be to not lose their own sense of individuality. Once you know what their needs are, you can start figuring out how your product or service can be of most use to them. I guarantee you that even if your product has a gazillion cool features, it wouldn’t be worth a zergling to them if it doesn’t somehow solve or alleviate one of their problems. It could be something really simple: I was consulting for a distributor of some kids scooters and we worked out a plan to help them fulfill that dream parental milestone of watching kids gleefully learning a new skill like scooting.
A ton of ideas cascaded from this one inspiration! You know who they are, you know what their problems are. Now you use that to your advantage to develop a strategy. The over-expansive Zerg player? You know she hasn’t built up her forces, so take out one of her undefended bases, cripple her economy, then overrun him. That Terran player sitting idly in his main base? If you can mass up your forces to contain his army, you’ll restrict his expansion and economic growth. You’ll gain map control and a large economic edge. Likewise, now that you know your audience’s problems, you can work out how your product can benefit them by solving these issues. At COMO Hotels, we identified that a key demographic of our wellness resort was the guest in search of the “Eat, Pray, Love” experience. Army composition is a big deal in StarCraft, because an army composed of only one kind of unit is easily overcome.
Hydralisks do a ton of damage and have good range, but they’re expensive and kind of squishy. Thus, pairing them with Roaches (cheaper and hardier units) makes your army exponentially more versatile and effective. Adding a few Vipers into the mix takes it up a few more notches because they have the Blinding Cloud ability to neutralize enemy ranged units like the Siege Tank to protect your units. With content strategy, the principle is the same. You might have one good idea, but focusing entirely on that idea makes you a boring one-trick pony with very predictable content. Instead, plan out an idea tree with different idea pillars. A big dramatic need can be approached from different angles, and each angle can be segmented into specific ideas. These then tie back to key solutions offered by your product/service. For example, when we were planning Carousell’s strategy in Australia, we knew we were targeting university students who were struggling with student debts and part-time jobs that either took up too much time or paid too little.
Our product is an e-commerce platform for preloved goods, so I designed a strategy helped them make money by seeding the idea of selling old clothes and belongings for spare cash. This was supplemented with the theme of saving money by buying preloved textbooks and laptops so you don’t have to pay full price. This made our app a lot more appealing than other e-commerce platforms that were all about buying brand-new items. An idea tree like this is invaluable during the content creation process, because you can always refer to it for inspiration and alignment to the plan. In StarCraft, the most direct way into your opponent’s base will be up a single ramp. Thus, that will usually be the most defended way in, and you can expect to find lots of Photon Cannons waiting to decimate you in this choke point. The counter to that is to come from different directions as well, so you can flank his forces and circumvent his static defenses. Use those towering Colossi to scale the cliffs at the side of his base, or use flying Void Rays to swoop in from behind.
” and you risk damaging your brand image.
Content is no different, and you should always try to reach your audience through as many touch points as you can. Honestly, it’s pretty easy to just create a Facebook page and call it a day, like that first little pig and his house of straw. But if you want to be really serious about reaching your audience, you’ll find out where else they frequent, and if your strategy suits those platforms. For example, hospitality brands benefits strongly from visual platforms like Instagram and Pinterest. Who doesn’t want to see gorgeous images of blue seas and white beaches? However, brands with a strategy that emphasizes price and promos like discount shops and petrol stations aren’t going to find an appreciative audience on those platforms. Sully their Instagram experience with your text-based promo images declaring “50% off! ” and you risk damaging your brand image. While analyzing the competition in a new market, I came across the Facebook page of a brand built around discount fuel.
A single monthly “discount day” post accounted for almost 95% of its average monthly engagement… which means the other posts were meaningless to its fans. Try expanding into Instagram with that approach! In StarCraft, your army is restricted by two major resource units: minerals and Vespene gas. You have a finite amount of both (especially Vespene), so if you’re planning to mass-produce the gas-intensive Mutalisk, you’re not likely to have much left over to produce the mighty Ultralisk. You should consider Hydralisks instead if your end goal involves Ultras. Think about the army composition you want, and budget accordingly. In marketing, minerals and Vespene are known as time and money. There’s really only so much you can do, and even the biggest brands will have a finite budget to work with. This is where planning comes in. Knowing what kind of content you have planned means you can decide how to allocate your budget. Videos, so vaunted these days for their engagement and virality potential, need time and money to produce. Don’t waste video resources on in-house cat videos that have zero brand-building potential. Devote video resources to important campaigns and big feature releases instead.
Social Media Outlet Definition
For smaller ideas, use simpler infographics or static visuals. There’s a concept in StarCraft called the timing attack, where you time an assault to coincide with factors that are advantageous to you. For example, if you are researching an armor upgrade for your infantry, it’s better to hold off your assault for that extra 20 seconds until the upgrade is completed and your army is all buffed up. The application of this in content strategy comes in the form of the content calendar. In the content calendar, you can plot all the major holidays, your product releases and marketing campaigns, and other events (school holidays, typhoon season), and then arrange your content for maximum impact. If you want to organize a YouTube campaign that encourages teens to shoot their own skate videos, you’re better off timing that during the school holidays rather than releasing it in the middle of their exam period. A content calendar keeps events in view so that your content can be designed to be highly contextual. For a lot of novice StarCraft players (myself included), army management is mostly hitting F2 to select all of your units and then moving them as a huge group from point to point. Pro players can micro manage smaller squads to harass enemy mineral lines, and poke around to find weaknesses and weak spots in the enemy’s defenses. For content strategy, that equates to small-scale experiments. Social media platforms are always coming out with new post types and there will always be new trending content styles.
Social workers interested in networking may find the perspective of businessman Ivan Misner helpful. Misner is the founder and current chairman of BNI International, a global networking company, and chairman of the board of the Referral Institute, which provides training in expanding businesses via referrals. “Hunters” run from one event to another, grabbing and passing business cards with very little interaction beyond diligently adding the card to their database. They believe that the bigger the list, the better their network. Consider the digital version of a hunter as some collecting friends on Facebook. “Farmers,” on the other hand, cultivate and grow authentic relationships with the people they want to include in their network. There is a steady reciprocal process of interacting so that everyone benefits. 1. An immediate place to begin is USC’s Social Work Alumni Association. Here, you can find volunteer opportunities, networking events, career advice, a job bank, information on what other social work alumni are doing and the e-newsletter, NewsBytes.
Topic title: Never Changing Social Network Company Will Eventually Destroy You
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