Social Media Monitoring

This is really all about Listening to what is being said about you, your company or other themes in Social Media. Reputation monitoring is another term used in this context. 

You might also want to listen for mentions of prospects, customers, competitors, partners and so on, or to keep in touch with news about a topic. 

The time you spend and the tools you choose for monitoring social media depends on the value of the information and the decisions you will take as a result of knowing that information. 

There is also an aspect of Insurance, as you probably want to know early on if a crisis is brewing, so if there's a lot of negative mentions about your products and service you can counter those comments as part of your pro-active plan or re-active response. Doing nothing, or being slow to respond can have very negative results as bad news travels very fast in Social Media.

Entry level

On a personal or company level you should be either looking for or being alerted to messages sent directly to you and mentions of you or your company in Social Media. With LinkedIn and Facebook this is fairly straight forward, especially if you turn ON email notifications in your profile settings. 

On Twitter it is slightly more difficult as you don't have an 'in-box' as such. You'll need to set up Twitter, or your desktop such as Hootsuite or Tweetdeck, to display Direct messages and Mentions in Columns. Some systems ie. Socialoomph can be set to send a daily summary to you via email, which is a useful back-stop but a bit infrequent for dialogue.

Google Alerts is another tool for monitoring a topic as it looks further out into Websites and Blogs to check for occurrences and then sends a daily email summary of 50 articles. It's not necessarily comprehensive and fool-proof as things could slip by, but it has its place.

Intermediate level

There is an explosion of consultancy offerings to help businesses, especially smaller ones, to get started on social media, but also to help to monitor this rapidly expanding communications eco-system on behalf of busy entrepreneurs and managers.

As well as a services based solution there are tools that might assist you to do this yourself. 

One that would be worth evaluating is Viralheat which has an impressive corporate client base but also has an inexpensive entry level solution.

Advanced level

There are several products that mid-larger companies could evaluate, such as Alterian SM2, Radian6 and others. 

These incorporate features like Sentiment to detect whether a comment is positive, neutral or negative, and to exclude some word or phrase combinations that are irrelevant to your specific interest area.

A useful introductory article on this topic is