10 things you should be monitoring (and a few more from me)

Posted on August 17th, 2006 in: Community Marketing, Social Media, Voice of the Customer

This is a great list! Here are 10 things you should be monitoring from Cameron Olthuis at Pronet. It’s advised you first listen, then understand before participating in any social media mediums.

  1. Company name
  2. Company URL
  3. Public facing figures
  4. Product names
  5. Product URLs
  6. The industry “hang outs”
  7. Employee activity/blogs
  8. Conversations
  9. Brand image
  10. Competitors

My additions:

11. Also monitor images/video, (Edit: Podcasts too! suggests Brian) such as flickr instances of your company, products, and employees. You may be surprised how your brand or products could be treated (think about the kids who raised money for an iPod to then smash it for online video, exploding laptops, and bike locks that get picked by a pen cap).

12. Monitor tags and Social search tools such as Delicious.

13. Monitor Social Voting tools like Digg.com (strong search) and Techmeme.com (which doesn’t have a strong search yet).

Advanced Listening Reccomendations:
14: This is nearly a part-time job for a small company, and nearly a full-time job for a company with large brand equity, or heavy activity. There are several firms that can offer listening services, but use that for reporting only. Train your product teams to learn how to listen, also consider offering forums for customers so you can bring conversations closer.

15: Also consider creating a feedback mechanism that allows customers to post URLs of conversations that they want you to see –why spend all the time searching, when you could also encourage customers, employees to submit links

16: Lastly, create a “Voice of the Customer” log in your intranet, perhaps using a blog, database, or other tool that can track sentiment, instance, and or voice.

Update: Joseph Jaffe has added #18-23 (I’m subscribed to his podcast, ‘Across the Sound’)
17: Consider devoting an individual or team to this. I suspect in the next few years, roles will appear called “Brand Monitor” or “Blogosphere Watcher”, It’s not just about ‘reporting’ but more like “real-time monitoring” of the voice of your customer. You can harness this to build better products, services, and be a better company.

Of course the next steps are to figure out how to jump in.