by Maria Ogneva
This article first appeared on MASHABLE.COM.
Maria Ogneva is the Director of Social Media at Attensity, a social media engagement and voice-of-customer platform that helps the social enterprise serve and collaborate with the social customer. You can follow her on Twitter at @themaria or @attensity360, or find her musings on her personal blog and her company’s blog.
Recently I wrote about the differences in social media monitoring and measurement, as well as the importance of doing both.
However, taking the first step to actually start monitoring can be daunting. And then what? How do you act on what you find when listening?
How do you engage? To ensure that you are successful in your monitoring and measurement efforts, here are some definitive steps you should follow.
I’ve developed these throughout my career and as part of my regular listening, participating and contributing to the space.
1. Define an Objective
Why are you monitoring? If the answer is “because everyone’s doing it,” you are in trouble. You need to have a clear goal in mind, such as:
- I want to monitor because I want to be alerted immediately when people are saying bad / good things about my brand.
- I want to quickly respond to all customer service queries, and I’m going to set up a way to collaborate and exchange information seamlessly with my support team.
- I’m monitoring so I can quickly see who is talking about [insert industry keyword] and join the conversation to bring more credibility to my brand.
- I’m monitoring so I can keep my finger on the pulse of the market so I can figure out what the market actually needs and then create it.
- I’m monitoring so I can easily identify people in need of my product and help them at the point of need.
- All of the above, and more!
Having an end goal in mind will help you target your resources correctly, select the right tool for the job and be more effective in the end.
Mike Dickman 