Each quarter Snoo.ws tackles a new series topic to provide our audience with insight, intelligence, examples and ideas. This month is Monitoring Month where we will cover everything from basic monitoring 101 to the top monitoring tools to monitoring's role in your overall strategy. So, stay tuned – there's plenty to come.
Social Media Monitoring tools are capable of generating large amounts of information, but they require human beings to read each post if you want to know what the public thinks of your latest marketing campaign, product release, or social media campaign.
Lack of Man-Power
You may already have access to many of the same tools that we use: Sysomos, Radian6, eCairn and Nielson are just some of the best-in-industry Social Media Monitoring tools that we like; and they are accessible to the public at large, as long as you pay for the subscription fees. While these tools have a lot of valuable information, they frequently are not used to their potential– if they are used at all.
Hard Numbers
Quantifying Social Media is a challenge. Several of these tools have computer algorithms that claim to be capable of identifying the sentiment of posts. Unfortunately, no algorithm is capable of understanding sarcasm. They frequently cannot pick up on misspellings, are incapable of determining relevant from irrelevant and are poor at picking up on nuances. Moreover, they cannot pick up on specific the types of information that you need. That is why ICUC is human-powered. Using a combination of people and technology, we can provide you with the hard numbers and statistics that you need.
Protected Information Monitoring
Alternatively, in the course of your day-to-day business, you likely have to entrust confidential information to partners, employees, clients and vendors. We can keep an eye out for you, monitoring daily, hourly or in real-time to ensure that this information does not remain in the public's view.
How We Help
These are not easy tasks. ICUC sifts through thousands upon thousands of tweets, blog posts and Facebook status updates each day. We seek out specific types of information, and report it back to you in an easily digestible report.
If you want to know how many people have bragged about purchasing your new product on Twitter each day over the course of a 90 day period; we can provide this information to you. If you want to know who has been bragging about your latest beta tested product in spite of Non-Disclaimer Agreements, we can do that, too!
We use the above tools and others, along with our own internal resources to provide our clients with the exact type of information that they need to help execute and measure their social media campaigns' success and ROI; protecting their interests, and better preparing them for conversations with their executives.
Although our clients are sometimes capable of doing this work. They hire us because they lack the needed manpower to get the most out of these tools; but mostly they rely on us because we do it better, faster, and more efficiently; so that you do not have to worry about categorizing each piece of uploaded content. With over 225 trained and equipped people who use Social Media Monitoring tools on a daily basis, ICUC has the man-power that your Social Media department lacks; so that you can understand if what is being said about your brand in Social Media is statistically significant.
Bryan Tritt is ICUC's In-House Counsel and Managing Director. Based in Montreal, Bryan has Civil and Common Law degrees from McGill University and a Master's Degree in Sports Business from New York University. Follow him on Twitter @bryantritt; or write him at bryan@icucmoderation.com for any of your monitoring, moderation and community management needs.
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