Field Notes Inside an Integrated Communications Agency

monitoring

  • What Should Every Company Be Monitoring?

    Sep 3, 2007 :: Steven Keith :: 0 Comments

    What Should Every Company Be Monitoring?

    This thread was begun by Cameron Olthuis, expanded by Steve Rubel, then further enhanced by Jeremiah Owyang, and most recently supplemented by Joseph Jaffe and Omar Ha-Redeye. Rather than continue this expansion on a series of discrete blogs, it makes more sense to make it a collaborative effort here. It would be great if each of these got its own page with ideas about how to conduct the monitoring effort. In any case here's the list of what every company should be monitoring:
    1. Company name
    2. Company URL
    3. Public facing figures
    4. Product names
    5. Product URLs
    6. The industry “hang outs”
    7. Employee activity/blogs
    8. Conversations
    9. Brand image
    10. Competitors
    11. Images/video like YouTube, Flickr, TVEyes, Google Video and Yahoo Video
    12. Tags and Social search tools like del.icio.us
    13. Social Voting tools like digg.com
    14. Memetrackers like Techmeme.com
    15. "Advanced Listening"
    16. Feedback URL and link threads
    17. “Voice of the Customer” log to track sentiment, instance, and/or voice.
    18. Develop new roles to such “Brand Monitor” or “Blogosphere Watcher”
    19. Self-clipping services like Google or Yahoo alerts for keyword mentions, but also audio and video hits as well...services likePODZINGER for example to ascertain conversational audio levels
    20. Media mentions by news features in search engines such as Google or Yahoo
    21. Relevant media news wires, such as Reuters (Intl.), AP News (U.S.), U.S. Newswire, CCN Matthews (U.K., Canada, Intl.),CNW Group (Canada), Mercopress (South Africa), allAfrica (Africa, general) and HR Net (Eastern Europe).
    22. Utilize RSS and aggregators like Bloglines in order to aggregate, integrate and assimilate all relevant incoming and outgoing moments of truth (perceived truth perhaps, or even truthiness according to Rob Stevens)
    23. Use wikis like PmWiki to discuss and debate pretty much everything from 1-19 and most importantly attempt to turn all the talk/conversation into walk/action.
    24. Repeat steps 1-20 to look outside of your own circle. Evolve the perspective from yourself, through your direct competitive set to your indirect competitive set and ultimately to your aspirational/non-endemic/non-competitive set. This is where you want to follow the leaders so to speak - Apples, Nikes, Googles or whichever company you admire.
    25. Create a PROACTIVE capability/budget in order to QUICKLY execute against everything you're monitoring - specifically opportunities like Fedex Furniture, Tiger Chipping in on the 16th.
    26. Conversely, have a REACTIVE process in place to comprehensively and compellingly respond, especially when you're on the bumpy receiving end of the stick.
    27. Search Term Volume
    28. Search Term Rank
    29. Relevant Wikipedia Entries
    30. Third Party Influencers
    31. Key Stakeholders
    32. Press release pickups
    33. Blog pickups using services like Technorati
    ........................
    Tags: monitoring social-media