“If you cant measure it, you can’t manage it.” as rightly quoted by management guru, Peter Drucker.

This is exactly what social media monitoring attempts to do. There are millions of conversations happening and by now if you have been reading my blogs, the message is loud and clear. If you cannot measure them with a predefined set of benchmarks then you cannot [do brand management] manage what is being said about your company and brand. Today enterprises, including those that approach iridium, face a bold challenge of managing their business in extremely dynamic webs + weeding out the conversations and dialogues in the humanized web networks. The crux of any good social media strategy is the Return on Investment or may I say ‘Return on Influence’. Sentiment Analysis and quantitatively measuring social media conversations gives an understanding of the business impact. Lets find out how.

I will point out the tangible benefits to any business or ROI from social media monitoring:

1. Gather consumer and competitor perceptions of a brand, then work towards changing their perceptions for the better.
2. Create avenues to let your consumers know that they are being heard.
3. Provides you with proactive crisis management and planning.
4. Provides warning or red alerts for defensive or reactive public relations.
5. Identify your real influencers.
6. Understand the environment of your business operations and the ecosystem it operates in.
7. Improves customer services which inturn leads to higher sales.
8. Reduces costs as this is the most cost effective way to touch base with a large volume of customers.
9. Reach the right customers faster and better.
10. Drives better decision making with the information aggregator tools.
11. Aids product development with live consumer inputs.
12. Enhanced SEO diminishes the need of paid searches.

These are some essential benefits anybody can avail from social media monitoring which iridium also provides. Await my next blog as I will talk conduct the SWOT analysis of Social Media Monitoring.

Follow us on @iridiuminter or my personal twitter @sbharatam.

Image Source: farfromtimid.com

Social media includes blogs, forums, wikis, tags and any user generated content. This is where consumers and users saw the opportunity to share their opinions and thoughts with so much ease.

Word of mouth marketing saw unprecedented growth which it never did before. Listening to these conversations on companies has brought about the importance of social media monitoring and the various tools invented to track and measure the zillion conversations happening online.

Social monitoring tools monitor:

• All websites
• Every possible social network
• Social news
• Blogs
• Forums
• Microblogs
• Images
• User generated content
• Tags
• Videos
• Almost every possible thing on Web 2.0

Social Media Monitoring tools will provide you with all the statistics. But it is sheer analysis that will give some sense to the random numbers and graphs these tools generate.

In my next blog I will talk more about these tools and provide you with more examples especially from my experience at iridium Interactive.

Follow us on @iridiuminter or my personal twitter @sbharatam.