In short: Keyword searches for your brands will miss some quality advocates
There’s a lot of talk in marketing and Social Media circles about ‘building brand evangelists’, and all that is well and good (and covered in-depth in infinite permutations on other and better blogs than mine. What may not be covered as much is how best to suggest and yes even help to control the language that your newfound brand advocates use to spread the gospel of your fantastic product or service.
What it boils down to is this:
I tell people about you how I want, not how you want. Therefore, your monitoring will always be incomplete.
A great example of this happened to me awhile back, when a friend @megfowler posted a twitter update complaining that she goes through lots and lots of earbuds. I’ve been a fan of my Etymotic ER6s for year now (both their product and their customer service have impressed me in the 5-6 years I have been using them.
My response (and recommendation) on twitter, however, looked like this:
“@megfowler might be time to invest in some high quality earbuds. i love mine http://bit.ly/ZX8cc“
You’ll notice, quite unintentionally, that my post did not mention Etymotic, the ER6, or etymotic.com. Now, the bit.ly link happens in this case to go to etymotic’s site, but it could’ve just as easily gone to Amazon or J&R or a random blog post on the topic.
If you’re not using an in-depth monitoring tool (and sometimes even when you are), you WILL miss conversations happening. This is something that is important for people to remember, in this age of ‘it’s all happening online, conversations are measurable’, that you’re going to miss some.
How are you going to become the kind of brand that makes people want to go out of their way to point you to things you might have missed?
This is a good point Jeremy, bu in my own experience I’ve found that tweetdeck actually does pick up the bit.ly link and knows where it links to. I know because on top of my searches and monitoring through Sysomos I also have Hootsute and Tweetdeck searches going and people that tweet a link to our blog, even with a shortened URL, still gets picked up in my “Sysomos” search column.
But, I do know what you mean that it won’t pick up everything.
Cheers,
Sheldon, community manager for Sysomos
you always gonna miss something, just as for example with Adwords you can’t target all the keywords in the world.
But I’m happy that for example in Tweetdeck, Searches are now including Bit.ly links as well.. happy surprise about that..
I think that most “vanilla” social media monitoring strategies would indeed catch your comment. Etymotic should be monitoring “high quality earbuds” or even just “earbuds.” And certainly paying attention to tweets that contain the term “earbuds” plus a link.
Excellent point. People are too eager to proclaim that they’ve discovered the ultimate social media monitoring tool. Even with the best keyword search strings, you’ll still miss things. Heck, even did try to type out the brand name but misspelled it, unless they had tools set up to pick up common brand and product name misspellings, you are still going to miss something.
Nothing on the web is absolute. It isn’t just social media. Do people constantly forget that some percentage of people clear their cookies on a regular basis?