Media Monitoring: Why Should You Care About What Others Think of You?
Getting the right feedback from the right people can be of vital importance for developing your business in the right direction. A few decades ago, you would have had to count on rare occasional personal experiences and surveys that could have easily lacked reliability and authenticity. Today, you can track conversations about your brand, mentions and complaints in real-time with little effort, especially if you decide to use some of the many media monitoring tools at hand.
Why is media monitoring important?
You can do some primitive sort of media monitoring manually, by using search engines and some default tools provided by social media, but this is not a very comprehensive nor time-saving way to find out what people are saying about you online. Instead, using a reputable media monitoring tool makes your life much easier because most of them basically do all the footwork for you and digest all the data collected over social media, and media in general, into a few coherent and intelligible pieces of information.
As it was mentioned, getting feedback can be crucial for business development – having an unbiased opinion on what’s wrong or at least what’s perceived to be wrong with your product is obviously the first step to improving it. Furthermore, you can check if you have been mentioned by influential people, either in a positive or in a negative context, and use it to your advantage. It’s also essential to check where all these conversations are happening – knowing where your customers “hang out” is useful information if you want to improve targeting for your upcoming digital marketing campaign.
Which Tools Should I Use?
There’s a large number of media monitoring tools out there and the list just keeps growing. If you’re planning to keep an eye on what people are saying, then this is generally good for you because it means that you can find the tool that suits all your needs.
For instance, Google Alerts is a very common choice and works in a very basic and intuitive way. You simply choose a few keywords that are in some way vital for your business – the name of your brand, your product, your competition or even your industry in general, and you’ll get an email when there’s new content containing some of the terms.
Hootsuite is also a popular choice, and it is also based on searching for desired keywords and notifying you if anything new is found across different networks. It goes beyond just monitoring – you can use it to check your outreach and measure results of your campaigns or schedule posts.
Some tools like Social Mention focus not just on the number of mentions, but also the sentiment and passion related to them. Sentiment represents the ratio of positive and negative mentions, while passion is the metric that measures how often people are inclined to repeat the keyword you’re interested in.
With other tools, like Mediaportal by Isentia, you can customize the manner in which you wish to be alerted – whether by a text message, email, RSS feed or smartphone notification. Isentia offers not just monitoring a huge number of standard online media, but also thousands of print sources and broadcast programs, as well as daily briefings that summarize all the relevant info for you every morning.
Engagement
Once you have all the important info, you can also get involved in the ongoing conversations wherever you see fit. In general, when you do this you should be helpful and respectful. Never lose your temper and have in mind that, ultimately, there’s no such thing as bad critics – if the critics are wrong, it will be easy to prove it, and if they’re right, you’ll have a chance to show that you’re supportive, knowledgeable, and willing to solve the problem. Having the right attitude towards your customers builds your brand’s reputation and the online community around it.
All in all, tracking what people think and say about you, as well as communicating with them afterwards, is very valuable for your business. You have the opportunity to continuously listen to the most unprejudiced possible feedback in real-time, so use all the tools at your disposal and make the most of them.
Author Bio:
Jolene Rutheford is a marketing specialist- turned blogger, currently writing quality content for Technivorz. She is interested in and passionate about media and social media, digital marketing, psychology and much more. Jolene loves coffee, jazz, dystopian and fantasy movies.
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