By Nicholas Oliver, Project Manager
“What’s all the hype about buzz monitoring? I know where our Twitter account is… we have analytics… I know and control what everyone is saying about us.” Wrong!
There is no way to control what people say about you within the social realm. The concept in itself is that people are free to discuss topics of their choice, with the people of their choice via an endless array of platforms. Across the world, 2 billion people access the internet via their computer, portable devices and even televisions with the goal of obtaining information and connecting with others.
How does buzz monitoring change any of this? The simple answer is; it doesn’t. The purpose of buzz monitoring is to understand your audience, their interests and how they talk about you. Imagine being able to see everytime a person talked about you or your company anywhere on the internet and being able to engage with them directly.
We understand that marketing and conversion is all about developing a relationship with a user through conversation and engagement – so how can buzz monitoring enhance these touch points?
We recently set up buzz monitoring for a client in order to better understand how their audiences were talking about their brand in the social space. In doing so, we came across this post on Twitter: “So it turns out I may not have confirmed my interview at XYZ. S***”. To the author and their friends, quite an insightful post – to the client, invaluable! Buzz monitoring would have enabled them to spot this immediately and engage with the user through Twitter in order to rearrange and ensure the completion of the funnel process. The business benefits of monitoring the buzz are clear and in many cases, tangible – take the Canadian university that was responsive to the speculative tweets of a prospective MBA student; they answered his queries quickly, thoroughly and personably. Their reward? A new student and a sizeable amount in fees.
So how will this help you? Until you have buzz monitoring and find out what your audience is saying about you, you won’t know…
Hi Nic. Could you recommend any good buzz monitoring sites? We’ve been trying socialmention but it’s not always very reliable!
Hi Jess,
As an agency we use a tool called Sentiment Metrics – http://www.sentimentmetrics.com/ which works in a similar way to Google Analytics; in that it builds up data over time and over a longer period gives you some really great insight.
Another industry favorite is Radian6 which enables you to view ‘chatter’ from the past as they cache a lot of it on their servers.
The big difference between the two though is the pricing model. Sentiment Metrics will have a cost per keyword/month cost model where as Radian6 charges based on the number of results and the amount of data returned. Either option has some pros and cons.
To throw a curve ball though, I’ve been reading quite a lot about a system called Lithium – http://www.lithium.com/what-we-offer/social-customer-suite/social-media-monitoring
This platform is designed with an in-house set of functionality in mind. It has, to some extend, workflow for response of social messages. So for example, you can enable your wider staff unit to engage with people in the social space – while monitoring what is being said.
It would be great to hear more about your ambitions in the social sphere, maybe we can discuss how best to achieve them?
All the best,
Nic