[...] first comes from Jeremiah Owyang (and was shared with me by Dan Schawbel) about social media audits. What Owyang calls an audit, we [...]

I've been an advocate for social media for years.

[...] 1 – Do a Social Media Audit of all your [...]

So many brands are so eager to dive into the far edge of the pool with gradiose plans in social marketing without taking a step back to gauge the temperature. Who is talking about your brand? How many of them are there and how influential are they? Where are they hanging out? What are they saying? What are their motivations? How is that changing over time? What is your competition doing? How do we identify the white space that gives us the optimal opportunity to participate?

These are questions that get answered with an audit. And the beauty is the ability to continually check back frequently — whether daily, monthly, quarterly — to see the impact of your marketing efforts on your online brand health. Where else do you get such instant acccess to a national focus group talking in their natural habitat?

Kudos, Jeremiah!

[...] interested – worried, really – about their online reputations. It’s also commonly agreed that monitoring the social media and analyzing the data is a crucial first step in any social media [...]

[...] Social media audits. Since the social media landscape is changing so often, how frequently should you reassess your strategy? If you were targeting college students on Facebook a year ago, is that demographic still there or has it moved on somewhere else? Reviewing your goals and priorities is an important part of any branding campaign and it is just as applicable to social media. Jeremiah Owyang has an interesting post on the types and frequency of social media audits. [...]

[...] The Importance of Social Media Audits « Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang | Social Media, Web Marketi… – Good takeaways. [...]

[...] Their social community building seems to be based on a much more customer service orientated approach than a sales approach.  Is there a lesson to be learned here? Is that the point when it comes to social media – as soon as you actively try to drive sales to a community you go back to the old methods of PUSH marketing and you just end up turning them all off. Dell still manages to integrate their Dell.com eCommerce operation with their community activities, but they don’t do it in an overt way – just in a ‘how can we better help the customer’ sort of way. Isn’t that how it should be? Although costs are always a consideration for any company, perhaps, in terms of measuring a ‘return’ on something as encompassing as social media, the non-financial impact of engaging the community of our customers is as far as we need to look. That is not to say there is no accounting.  Only today, Jeramiah Owyang emphasized the  “The Importance of Social Media Audits”. [...]

[...] The Importance of Social Media Audits [...]

There are some great comments posted already, just another thought – I think Brands/Employers should create Monitoring and Auditing champions, not just internally within their companies, but also in social communities – and draft a reward policy for such individuals and recognize them in social forums. This possibly would fall under #3 (Conduct Ongoing Monitoring) option you have suggested, but I feel this will be a very effective means of round the clock monitoring, when clubbed with available monitoring tools and technology.

Thanks again for sparking such an interesting, relevant and important discussion.

Regards,

Sid Mishra
@SiddMishra

There have been some great comments posted earlier, another thought (didn’t see this posted already) should be for employers to create Social media monitoring and auditing champions, not just internally, but in the communities as well – and draft a reward policy to recognize such individuals. This possibly would fall under your #3 (Conduct Ongoing Monitoring) category, but the impact of having such Champions spread all over will be much more effective when clubbed with monitoring tools & technology is what I feel.

Thanks again for sparking off such a relevant and important discussion.

Regards,

Sid Mishra
@SiddMishra

When talking about specific goals of an audit, i would highlight the need to bring the marketing function front and center. In the end, customer acquisition is the more important thing our client’s care about. So while monitoring and listening are indeed critical, we want to focus our monitoring and listening on the “infrastructure of the offer” and how we strategize, message, integrate, and track our offers across the marketing function. One of the biggest problems with social media strategists is the lack of focus on customer acquisition. We all know the backlash has already started, and will become more apparent in early 2010 when CEOS start looking for accountability and it is not there. As our friend Drucker has said – the purpose of the business is to create a customer, and sadly this mantra is more and more missing from the social media framework for marketing.

[...] The Importance of Social Media Audits « Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang | Social Media, Web Ma… – Just as brands conduct audits of inventory, employees, and budgets on an often annual basis, they should also survey the landscape to find out what customers, influencers, partners and employees are participating on the social web. Audits are key for identifying priorities, benchmarking previous efforts, and planning for future efforts; the same applies for social media. [...]

[...] The Importance of Social Media Audits [...]

[...] The Importance of Social Media Audits « Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang | Social Media, Web Marketi… "Just as brands conduct audits of inventory, employees, and budgets on an often annual basis, they should also survey the landscape to find out what customers, influencers, partners and employees are participating on the social web." (tags: socialmedia marketing) [...]

[...] The Importance of Social Media Audits (Web Strategy by Jeremiah) [...]

Firstly congrats on sparking such an interesting conversation with social media conversationalists

Thanks for taking the time to talk to us at Brandtology recently and I would like to think that our conversation helped you shape some of your thoughts in your interesting blog post.

Doing an audit prior to strategy development and execution is a good practice, just like in conventional brand management. I think it’s even more important in the social media landscape. As it is relatively new to a number of companies and brand owners, really more frequent radar scanning is necessary for charting up the course of action in the social media space. The above views are supported by many customer enquiries and works, in different International and Asian markets with a multitude of local languages.

I would like to share some purposes that clients have generally come to us to do an audit on and discover some insights about. The roles of these stakeholders (whether in Marketing, Sales, PR, Product Management, C-level, etc) each have their own “actionable insights” that they want to take away from an audit. They generally don’t want to spend time and resources on how to set up the keywords, etc and then maintain and train such a system and so would rather engage a service such as ours.

Some different purposes for a social media brand audit we’ve seen are:
• Cross border regional audit on the same issues but in different markets/countries (thus yielding different results and insights)
• Highly accurate sentiment analysis on certain events/issues with huge number of posts (macro and micro sentiment view on issues)
• General perception of brand and change of buzz over weeks/months
• Competition mapping (where they stand and where they’re heading vis-à-vis their competitors)
• Horizon scanning (they want to know potential upcoming trends and threats)
• Pre, during and post campaign audit for both online and offline outreach and marketing (ROI/KPI measurement)

I hope this contributes a bit more to this already excellent conversation thread.

Thanks.

Kelly Choo
brandtology.com

I never understand why brands or individuals jump right into a community without having studied them. It often leads to “guess and check” methods of communication, which can ultimately lead to a negative outlook towards to brand/individual. Audits, monitoring and other in-depth information gather methods have to be utilized to be truly successful.