Monitoring social media for big business: Guest Blogger - Debbie Curtis-Magley, UPS

Posted by Debbie Curtis-Magley on August 20, 2008

(Members of the Blog Council lead corporate blogging and social media at large corporations. We are delighted to share their thoughts on blogging from the corporate perspective. This post is the guest author’s personal opinion.)

Navigating the blogosphere can feel a bit like traveling through the Wild West. You might find your brand mentioned in lots of fascinating (and sometimes bizarre) conversations. Effective monitoring provides insight into customer pain points that may not be on your company’s radar. It can also identify emerging opportunities that haven’t shown up in research studies.

But what do you focus on? And how do you quickly distinguish random chatter from critical insights?

Before you invest in a monitoring service, consider these tips to map out your strategy.

Determine what you want to learn

Monitoring can take a variety of directions, depending on what you want to learn and how your company will benefit from the information. A few approaches to consider:

• General brand conversations: if you’re looking to get a snapshot at the volume and share-of-voice your brand represents within online channels
• Reputation topics: if you need to monitor issues that are opportunities or threats to your brand
• Business industry sectors: if you need to understand your brand’s role and reputation within market sectors

Identify the unique hurdles associated with searching your brand

Unless your company has a truly unique name, it’s likely that search results will show discussions not related to your brand. It’s been tricky with the name “UPS”. It’s part of commonly used phrases, such as “mash-ups”,”big ups”, and “meet-ups”. There are also other services that are associated with the acronym “UPS”, like “universal power system”. You’ll improve your monitoring efforts by identifying terms that pull irrelevant conversation posts in your search results.

Understand the limits of automated search tools

While an automated search tool can help filter and organize the conversations about your brand, they aren’t effective at analyzing the context and tonality of discussions. That’s due to the informal nature of how people communicate online. The construction of a comment, word choice and emphasis placed on certain phrases makes it easy for an automated tool to incorrectly score a negative comment as positive or vice-versa.

You can’t escape the need for human analysis if you truly want to understand the discussions surrounding your brand. At UPS, our staff reviews and tracks the conversations rather than outsourcing this work to a vendor. It keeps us directly informed on shifts in conversations and potential issues brewing at blogs and discussion boards.

Debbie Curtis-Magley is Manager of Corporate Public Relations at UPS