What Should Every Company Be Monitoring?
This thread was begun by
Cameron Olthuis, expanded by
Steve Rubel, then further enhanced by
Jeremiah Owyang, and most recently supplemented by
Joseph Jaffe and
Omar Ha-Redeye. Rather than continue this expansion on a series of discrete blogs, it makes more sense to make it a collaborative effort here. It would be great if each of these got its own page with ideas about how to conduct the monitoring effort. In any case here's the list of what every company should be monitoring:
- Company name
- Company URL
- Public facing figures
- Product names
- Product URLs
- The industry “hang outs”
- Employee activity/blogs
- Conversations
- Brand image
- Competitors
- Images/video like YouTube, Flickr, TVEyes, Google Video and Yahoo Video
- Tags and Social search tools like del.icio.us
- Social Voting tools like digg.com
- Memetrackers like Techmeme.com
- "Advanced Listening"
- Feedback URL and link threads
- “Voice of the Customer” log to track sentiment, instance, and/or voice.
- Develop new roles to such “Brand Monitor” or “Blogosphere Watcher”
- Self-clipping services like Google or Yahoo alerts for keyword mentions, but also audio and video hits as well...services like PODZINGER for example to ascertain conversational audio levels
- Media mentions by news features in search engines such as Google or Yahoo
- Relevant media news wires, such as Reuters (Intl.), AP News (U.S.), U.S. Newswire, CCN Matthews (U.K., Canada, Intl.), CNW Group (Canada), Mercopress (South Africa), allAfrica (Africa, general) and HR Net (Eastern Europe).
- Utilize RSS and aggregators like Bloglines in order to aggregate, integrate and assimilate all relevant incoming and outgoing moments of truth (perceived truth perhaps, or even truthiness according to Rob Stevens)
- Use wikis like PmWiki to discuss and debate pretty much everything from 1-19 and most importantly attempt to turn all the talk/conversation into walk/action.
- Repeat steps 1-20 to look outside of your own circle. Evolve the perspective from yourself, through your direct competitive set to your indirect competitive set and ultimately to your aspirational/non-endemic/non-competitive set. This is where you want to follow the leaders so to speak - Apples, Nikes, Googles or whichever company you admire.
- Create a PROACTIVE capability/budget in order to QUICKLY execute against everything you're monitoring - specifically opportunities like Fedex Furniture, Tiger Chipping in on the 16th.
- Conversely, have a REACTIVE process in place to comprehensively and compellingly respond, especially when you're on the bumpy receiving end of the stick.
- Search Term Volume
- Search Term Rank
- Relevant Wikipedia Entries
- Third Party Influencers
- Key Stakeholders
- Press release pickups
- Blog pickups using services like Technorati
- Microblogging sites like Twitter
- Total comments and unique commenters by post to help determine most viral conversations
- Inbound and outbound links to posts (who and how many)
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