Social media monitoring is important to every company and brand. The social Web is creating both opportunities and risks to our businesses. Social media is growing in popularity and creating an enormous public relations impact with simple communication tools, like: blogs, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and hundreds of others.
These simply mean your job as a PR specialist or corporate strategist is more critical than ever. Social media, given to viral-like behavior, could instantly make your brand a rock star or drag you into a PR crisis firestorm. The key to being in the best position on both is social media monitoring.
1. Start with a RSS Reader - The first step in any good social media monitoring campaign is to find a good intelligence collection tool. I prefer, as a starter tool, Google Reader. This is one of the most popular RSS feed aggregators and makes collecting known social media sources simple.
In most cases adding bits of social media information to your monitoring is as easy as clicking on the websites RSS link, button, or icon. This will then redirect you to a page asking your RSS reader type–select Google.
2. Subscribe to Industry Blogs - Now that you have your free social media monitoring software in place start looking for leading industry or competitor blogs. With the growing popularity of these informal publishing platform, nearly everyone has them.
These blogs are often oozing with leaks, tips, and prognostication. Also, look for clues to other related information sources (blogs) in the blogroll. This is where many bloggers list other websites and blogs they follow.
The neatest part of all is that you can subscribe to these RSS feeds for free and anonymously.
3. Subscribe to Key Searches - Websites and blogs are one thing, but if you want the latest scoop you should subscribe to RSS feeds on searches. I have found the most productive way to do this is by using Google News Search, Google Blog Search, and Twitter Search. Each of these will allow you to do your keywords search, view the results, and then if you like it subscribe via RSS. This will update your Google Reader with the latest results as they come in.
4. Actively Discover and Prune Your Feeds - As you begin subscribing to RSS feed you will quickly discover that without good analytical tools on top of this data it is quickly overwhelming. The best way to combat this without buying a more sophisticated social media monitoring tool is to constantly discover new (and better) sources and pruning the less productive ones.
5. Don’t Forget Reporting - One of the best things about Google Reader is you can quickly alert your team or management about emerging trends. I suggest using primarily the email feature, but you can also share within the Google Reader to push the information out through a social media channel like Twitter or Facebook.
The Google Reader can be a great first step in social media monitoring. Although it is very limited in discovering emerging sources and trends, it can give you the leg up on competitors. It’s other weakness is of course analysis and reporting, but again it can get you started.
The most important thing is to remember that social media is a great source of early warnings, trending opportunities and risks, and will keep you in the know. If your are monitoring social media actively you will rarely be surprised with a PR opportunity or crisis ever again.
About Bill Rice
