The Social Enthusiast

Have you ever been out on a date with a person who keeps blathering on and on about himself/herself? What are the odds you’re going to agree to a second date?

There is a strong tendency, when a company begins monitoring social media references to their brand, to focus almost solely on the negative mentions.

It’s often a case of “the squeaky wheel gets the grease,” and it often results in a social media engagement effort that spends all its time trying to please the unhappy people and none at all acknowledging, encouraging and rewarding the people who are talking up your brand to their friends.

…few people will argue that social media doesn’t have clear, distillable value to companies. Social media monitoring, in my opinion, is one of the most easily translatable value-driven elements of corporate social media, especially when viewed as an add-on to existing brand research efforts.

When you first approach your advertising agency or a consultant about social media services, is your attention focused on activities with direct customer interaction? I know that my clients often overlook monitoring and measurement, unless I direct their attention to them. The irony is that these less-sexy activities often provide the most practical business value, particularly at the outset of an organization’s explorations into the social media space.

One of the most compelling and confounding questions in social media is how to determine success or failure? Return on Investment is a persistent topic among social media professionals. It’s not that there aren’t plenty of things that you can measure. The question is, what should you measure, and what do those numbers mean in terms of business objectives?