Field Notes Inside an Integrated Communications Agency

Active social media monitoring can keep you in the know about what consumers think of your brand. When done effectively, it allows you to spot fires in the making and work on putting them out before they reach three-alarm status. It also provides great opportunities to connect directly with customers, potential customers and brand enthusiasts in real-time which can breed a great deal of brand loyalty.

But yours isn't the only brand you should monitor.

The widespread use of social media coupled with a good listening strategy makes it very easy to keep an eye on your competitors, and you should be watching them like a hawk. Now, before you write off this tactic as "stalking," allow me to illustrate its effectiveness: Let's say you work for a TV station in a medium-sized market where the top three affiliates are very close in the ratings. If you follow the competitor's interactions with viewers and actively monitor their brand you might be able to glean all kinds of helpful information.

Consider this: That exclusive interview that Station X just landed is no longer exclusive when the interviewee announces to his or her twitter followers that they just did a 20 minute interview with said station and can't wait until it airs next week. If you're lucky, someone will likely inquire further about the topic and the interviewee will spill the beans all over the Twitterverse. They may also spread the word in their blog or via Facebook. After all, an interview with a news reporter is just too juicy and self-aggrandizing for most people to keep it out of their social media status updates.

But this isn't just a tactic for TV stations. Any company or organization can find out what's being said about their competition and use it to their advantage if they simply start listening. If Comcast sees a ton of gripes about Time Warner Cable in a market where they compete directly, they can literally go in for the kill if they can sell their services as superior or offer a better deal and maybe make a conversion in the process.

This is not small potatoes when every customer counts.

I posted a blog last summer about a bad experience I had at a hotel that did not want to honor the deal Orbitz gave me for booking my travel through their site. I heard from a competitor a few hours after my blog post was published encouraging me to use their site in the future. They were clearly monitoring mentions of Orbitz in the social media space. The good thing is Orbitz monitors its own brand and they contacted me first, apologized and gave me $50 off my next booking. But, if Orbitz had not responded, I certainly would have gone to that competitor. And if nothing else, they put themselves on my radar, and that's a good thing for that competitor. There are many ways to use social media for business and they go well beyond what you've grown accustomed to hearing. We'll explore many more in the near future.

So bookmark this blog if you haven't already. We've got a lot to talk about.