Identifying and measuring sentiment
PR Week recently published an article about online reputation entitled ‘The art of monitoring social media’ in it Arun Sudhaman carries out product reviews of the top companies offering social media monitoring.
There is no perfect solution to social media monitoring available at the moment, but there are products that can help. However, at a recent social media conference, I learnt about the potential of setting up an iGoogle dashboard to help identify conversations taking place online.
Put simply, you can set up a personalised dashboard which can include quick links to social media sites, for example, You Tube, Flickr and Twitter. But, there is so much more scope than that, you can built search terms into sites such as Twitter Search, Board Reader and Blog Pulse which will allow you to see what is being said about your organisation.
You can set up your iGoogle homepage so it displays what is being said about your organisation on blogs, discussion boards, forums and Twitter.
By setting up a monitoring page it allows you to quickly see what is being said and gives you an opportunity to respond. If you do choose this method you will have to come up with your own evaluation system, whether it is as simple as positive, negative or neutral is up to you.
Alternatively, Sudhaman offers advice and reviews about companies that can offer this service and Radian6 seems to come out on top.
Whether you choose to do this in house or enrol the help of the experts is up to you, but whatever your approach, collecting this data is key to the success of your communications plan. Ignoring what is being said about your company can turn a molehill into a mountain as momentum gathers on social networks.