Micheal Corleone (The Godfather Part II) said it best when he said to keep your friends close but your enemies closer. Successful business operations do not exist in a vacuum. Part of running a successful business means staying informed of developments within and outside your industry. Such “listening” assists in identifying opportunities and avoiding pitfalls. According to Radian 6 blogger (www.radian6.com) Trish Forant in a June 2011 post (“Keeping Tabs on the Competition“), “one way you can gain that edge is by using social media to listen to, and about, your competitors in real time.”
A social media listening program, AKA social media monitoring solution, is nothing more than the setting up a computer program to find social media content – blog postings, Facebook comments, Tweets, etc. – that mention key words and phrases of interest. Typical key words and phrases include your company’s name, location and other business specific terms. However, just as important as tracking conversations that involve your company is tracking conversations that involve your industry and your competition.
Social media listening programs provide two main benefits to any organization. First, by actively monitoring events that affect your industry you can learn about the successes of others within the industry and use that information to benefit your organization. For example, through a social media listening program an organization can learn about the successful marketing techniques being used by a competitor across town or across the country. That information can then be used to enhance the organization’s own marketing program.
Equally beneficial is the use of social media to listen for and discover adverse events that affect the industry and competitors. Through a listening program it is possible to determine that certain practices within the industry are resulting in legal action or referrals to regulatory authorities. Having this information early enough can help your organization take preventive action and avoid negative publicity and legal action.
For example, assume that a debt collection firm utilized the review of publicly available information on social network pages of delinquent borrowers when performing due diligence on the borrowers. Now assume that news was released on a blog that in a neighboring city, county or state, a judge found such practices illegal. The discovery of this information provides the organization with the opportunity to evaluate its collection practices to implement any necessary changes to prevent potential legal issues.
Monitoring others’ successes and failures provides the organization with an early warning system. Through the monitoring process the organization can identify trends – positive or negative – as they form. This process will assist the organization in making appropriate changes to policies, processes and training to prevent adverse outcomes or to take advantage of opportunities.
Blogger Debbie Hemley in an April 2011 post (“15 Ways to Monitor Your Competitors’ Use of Social Media to Gain Social Intelligence“) on GigCoin.com (blog.gigcoin.com) provided the following 15 tips relative to monitoring the social media activities of competitors.
1. Whether or not your competitors were early adopters of Social Media or if they’ve joined in later in the game? Are they playing catch-up? Or do they appear to be making leaps ahead?
2. How many followers and fans do they have? Are they working at expanding the numbers or did they simply put up the pages and are now passively working at maintaining them?
3. Are they responding to blog comments? How long does it take for them to respond?
4. What topics are your competitors writing about? For instance, you can use this to find the holes in their content so you can develop a more comprehensive content strategy.
5. Where do your competitors have a presence on social networking platforms? Blog, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube? When was the last time they updated?
6. Are they using video? What do you like about what they are doing with video? Where can your videos stand out?
7. Monitor popular keywords within your industry. Are your competitors writing about those topics?
8. Look at their company profile on LinkedIn, do they have dedicated social media people within their departments?
9. Are they actively using social media to market their business?
10. How often do they write blog posts? Who writes the posts?
11. Are they using share widgets? How can your readers help to spread your content more effectively?
12. Have they fully integrated their social media presence? Do they have the links to the pages on their corporate website?
13. Are they using Facebook contests or sweepstakes? Are they offering good prizes? What can you do that will be more enticing?
14. What type of content are they sharing on Twitter? Their own links? Are they sharing news worthy stories from other sources? Are they retweeting, using hashtags, @replies? Can you have a more notable presence on Twitter?
15. Are they responding to questions and comments on Facebook comments? How long does it take them? Do they appear to have dedicated staff monitoring their pages? Are they using Facebook for customer service and support?
There exist dozens of companies offering social media monitoring solutions. Some are free, many require some expense and some are quite costly. The main determinant in deciding on a particular social media monitoring solution is complexity of the organization, budget available and management’s expectation.
In their January 2011 SocialMedia.biz blog post (“Top 20 Social Media Monitoring Vendors for Business”), J.D. Lasica and Kim Bale provided a list of their top 20 social media monitoring solutions. According to the authors, “the online landscape is saturated with more than 200 tools and platforms claiming to be able to help you track and assess mentions of your business or brand in social media channels. While there remains a lot of churn in the field, a number of listening platforms have evolved to help you go beyond basic monitoring into an integrated approach that helps inform multiple parts of your business: product development, customer support, public outreach, lead generation, market research and campaign measurement.”
Regardless of the social media monitoring solution chosen, a good place to start is with a simple Google Alert. Through the free Google Alert service it is possible for any organization to easily and quickly track key words and phrases on the Internet, including those on social media platforms. This information is useful “as is” and may also assist during the implementation of more robust social media monitoring solutions by providing the type of information that currently exists relative to your organization, competition and industry.
For example, an alert using the search terms “social media,” “failure” and “debt collector” will inform the user when an Internet article occurs that mentions social media failures that involve debt collection. Multiple Google Alerts can be set up to cast as wide of a net as necessary. These alerts will provide ongoing information that will make it possible to identify events and trends that may further mitigate risk or result in greater success.
Of course, all this great information requires that the organization assign the task of “listening” to someone that can provide a meaningful interpretation of the information and provide an effective reporting to the appropriate individuals.
While gangster Michael Corleone had it right regarding keeping tabs on the competition, it was clergyman William Pollard’s comments that are most germane when it comes to social media monitoring solutions when he said “information is a source of learning. But unless it is organized, processed, and available to the right people in a format for decision making, it is a burden, not a benefit.”
