Social Media Monitoring Notes

Greetings for those who are attending Wednesday's CoSIDA presentation. Here is the first of three breakdowns of the monitoring tools and philosophies.

For more depth on the question of monitoring, I had the benefit of some outstanding presentations at the 2010 NAB convention earlier this year. Paul Vogelzang, Alexandra Gebhardt and Ron Harlan were the key speakers. If you want more, I’d highly recommend your connecting with their blogs and twitter feeds.

All three agree – you no longer control your brand and you fail to monitor it at your own risk. I think this is a concept that we in collegiate sports understand on a message board level. Corporate America rarely has a the experience of standing message boards of fan that can turn in an instant on a coach or team. On the other side, college administrators often don’t look beyond the boards or Facebook to monitor or worry.

Much of Vogelzang’s presentation focused on the negative impact of viral video, citing key examples like those that hit Dominos, Comcast, Delta Air Lines, Kryptonite Locks and KFC. As he called it, “this is the form of civil disobedience of the day.”

(Quick aside: you should be really scared that most of these links are old -- the ZeFrank rant on Delta and the Comcast guy are from 2006, and it too very very simple Google searches like "pick Kryptonite lock" to find them on the first results page.)

Monitoring is important – “safeguarding and protecting your online reputation is as important as a credit score” – but it is too late to jump into the social media sphere when it has hit the fan. Part of the defense against these events is the creation of social media, blogs and feeds to build a core of followers so that you can have real friends help defend you.

He advocated company blogs, but steering the conversation not editing it. The customers are going to write about you and your company somewhere, at least when the conversation is in your space it can be dealt with quickly. If complaining is nagging or good-natured, let it happen. Participate in the conversation and try to add to it.

One of his best pieces of advice was this: if you see a problem, deal with it now. It’s one thing to monitor, but it does nothing if you lack the will to actually engage. Vogelzang was very clear: investigate the facts, research the conversation chain but most of all, be honest, open and transparent. Anything less looks like astro-turfing – fake grass roots efforts.