Effective Social Media Monitoring: A New Part of the Reputation Management Equation
Posted: 1/27/2010

Jillian Froehlich
Senior Associate
Chair, Social Media
jillian.froehlich@clynch.com

Just 10 years ago, the term “media monitoring” equated to the newspaper and magazine clips that third-party vendors would send via snail mail to their clients on an ongoing basis, stuffed into thick envelopes with the publication’s circulation information typed on an index card attached to each article.

How times have changed.

In recent years, tracking coverage in the increasingly fragmented media landscape has become a monumental task, and many of the media monitoring services of the old days simply aren’t up to the task of scrutinizing important brand engagements taking place online. While a few free tools such as Google Alerts and others have evolved to serve as basic social media monitoring solutions, they are still fairly basic and limited in terms of effectiveness, providing coverage that is spotty at best.

Recognizing the need for truly effective monitoring of our clients’ brands in the ever-changing online era, Carmichael Lynch Spong employs proprietary technology to aggregate, measure and analyze news media and consumer opinion information from a vast amount of traditional and social media sources — including blogs, social networks, Web sites and message boards — to yield invaluable insights.

Using this resource, clients are better positioned to:

• Gauge the qualitative and quantitative changes in online conversation over time
• View the impact of social media campaigns
• Easily monitor and understand, in real time, crucial information such as the tone and reach of online conversations
• Track viral communication gone bad — an essential priority for successful issues management in an era when “going global” can happen within a matter of minutes.

Clients that make social media monitoring part of their reputation management equation are better prepared to react quickly to ensure their brands retain the lasting patina they deserve. Anything less, and the sentiments of a company’s reputation can end up buried in an envelope of clippings that arrives weeks too late.

Did you know?

• The simplest algorithms work by scanning keywords to categorize a statement as positive or negative, based on a simple binary analysis (“love” is good, “hate” is bad). But that approach fails to capture the subtleties that bring human language to life: irony, sarcasm, slang and other idiomatic expressions. Reliable sentiment analysis requires parsing many linguistic shades of gray.¹
• Some 40 new (blogs) every day could be talking about your business, engaging your employees, or leaking those merger discussions you thought were hush-hush.²

¹ New York Times
² BusinessWeek