Thanks to the duality of modern communications (organizations’ control being less than or, at best, equal to that of stakeholders), listening to the conversations about your brand that are already taking place prior to your own efforts is critical to measurement success. According to Rob Key, CEO of Converseon, this is the point at which you will:
- Mine conversations for data;
- Identify key influentials;
- Determine topics/sentiment;
- Establish success metrics/key performance indicators; and,
- Conduct internal and external discovery.
These actions can only be accomplished by listening closely to conversations within the social media universe—an intimidating concept, but one that is made possible by an ever-growing number of free and user-friendly monitoring tools (think Technorati, Google Alerts, TweetScan, etc.).
For more on this topic, see the June 1, 2009 issue of PR News.