Some thoughts on social media monitoring
Last week I attended Social Media Club PDX’s networking event on Social Media Monitoring, where Scout Labs, Iterasi, and Webtrends (with Radian6) presented information on social media monitoring tools and what social media monitoring is. Social Media Monitoring is an emerging field of both free and paid applications that provide monitoring of the social web. It’s very much in the early stages of development, but its clear that social media monitoring is essential for businesses that want to manage their social media presence.
While free tools can offer some businesses with a tight budget some leeway, they don’t necessarily provide the same depth of analysis and monitoring that the tools discussed at this meeting could give. For example, Positive Press developed by Iterasi allows people to capture and archive articles and other data, with the ability to also tag the information so that it can be referenced at any time. Scout Labs allows you to determine the level of positive, neutral, and negative mentions, and Webtrends, in collaboration with Radian6 is able to show the conversion of rate of actual traffic that goes to a website vs the number of mentions that have a link to the website. All of these are powerful tools and they will continue to get better and better as time goes on.
Paid social media monitoring is driven mostly toward enterprise level businesses. Certainly those businesses need social media monitoring tools to stay on top of what is being said about their businesses, but small businesses also need such tools. Each of the above mentioned companies provides packages with different levels of monitoring available for businesses. This is useful for small businesses that don’t have the budget an enterprise business has, but also likely doesn’t need to monitor as much as that larger company will.
It will be interesting to see where social media monitoring will go, but even where it’s at now, there’s some promising tools being created that will be useful for any business that is serious about monitoring and managing their social media presence.
