You could have the greatest messaging, the best brand identity or the coolest content in the world, but if you don’t know where your target audiences are talking to each other online, you’ll never get their attention. Likewise, if that same target audience is bad-mouthing your brand on some social media platform, you won’t know until it’s too late. But unless you have an army-sized staff to troll the Internet 24/7, monitoring all social media for compelling conversations (positive or negative) is an impossible task.
To hone the universe of influencers that matter to your brand, Monte Lutz, SVP of Digital Public Affairs at Edelman, recommends answering the following five questions before getting started:
1. Who? Do you want to monitor 100 million blogs or 100 influencers?
2. Where? Which platforms are you looking at (blogs, forums, social media, online news sites, comments, etc.)?
3. Why? Do you want to understand or act on the conversation? What is more important: volume, sentiment or both?
4. How much? Do you want to monitor the entire issue or just your brand?
5. When? Real-time, red-flag, daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly?