This week I was interviewed on the best ways to measure social media and the different applications for both PR and advertising professionals.
PRWeek wanted to know more about how Radian6 makes social media monitoring a user-friendly experience. My answer to this question touched on the fact that users often start off trying to manually monitor blogs using a collection of free online tools. However they quickly discover that they are missing user generated content from sources other than blogs and getting overwhelmed with what they do find with too little time to analyze and no way of knowing what they should be focused on from a priority point of view. I mentioned that a social media monitoring solution should allow for the ability to monitoring all forms of social media from blogs, video and image sharing sites, opinion sites and forums to new platforms like microblogging. The tool should track viral properties continually on every type of content so that it can be sorted and prioritized. It should be helpful in finding trends, influencers, and crisis’ and be a valuable tool for comparing relative buzz verses competitors and between known issues. Social media is high speed and so the solution used needs to be able to track in real-time and with a user-interface that turns the complex into the easy-to-use-and-understand.
PRWeek wanted to know some of the best ways to measure social media. I mentioned that a solution should help the user dynamically measure buzz, sentiment, influences and other conversational metrics. And it should measure by topics as defined by the user whether by brand, competition, industry, personality or corporation.
Finally, PRWeek wanted to know the different uses of social media monitoring in the PR and advertising fields. For PR professionals, the ability to track online conversations, uncover potential crisis’ as they happen and know which influential sites or individuals to engage with is invaluable. On the ad side, social media monitoring uncovers growing trends, shows the locations of on topic conversations for ad placements and provides a way to gauge the effectiveness and impact of a campaign over time.
