One of the most beneficial uses of online collaboration is monitoring the perception of your brand. People are talking about you online. Some organizations choose to believe that not investing in an online community insulates them from potential negative customer feedback or discussions. The unfortunate truth is that those conversations still take place in third-party communities, and then the organization does not have the benefit of participating. Perceptions within social media quickly define a brand and shape the customer expectations. Social technologies enable your message to spread faster than ever, but it also means that managing your message is more difficult than ever. This is due in part to the fact that you no longer have complete autonomy over your brand perception. The good news? There are now more ways than ever to monitor what is being said about your company. There are two distinct ways that your brand and keywords can be monitored and analyzed:
Both monitoring capabilities are a necessity, but there are very distinct roles that each plays. You can monitor communities like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube; competitors’ sites; news outlets; and virtually any other source to find mentions of topics and keywords that are important to you. This provides you that ability to quickly understand and act on those mentions, correcting inaccuracies or heralding great stories. You can identify shifts in brand popularity and sentiment. Know who is saying what, and where they are engaged. Measuring engagement in your own communities is just as vital. Drilling deep and mining data about your users will help you improve your customer support efficiency and proving the value of your online communities. Internal analysis can provide you with more targeted messaging and an enhanced sales process. In order to be successful, organizations must understand user engagement both inside and outside of their online communities through monitoring and measuring.