Social media monitoring has taken on heightened importance in a wide range of business concerns, from communications to customer service.
In PR and on Social media platforms, monitoring—and responding—can be powerful tools for shaping your image and claiming a greater share of voice.
Paying close attention can also help you glimpse future trends in your industry, says Kirsten Hamstra, senior global social media manager at SAS, a North Carolina-based software analytics company.
“It’s not just listening to what people are saying about you,” she says. “It’s listening about where you want to go, what the future holds.”
Here are lessons from the way SAS runs its highly effective monitoring program:
SAS has a team that tracks any mention of the company and its products, including questions, comments, concerns and user issues, Hamstra says.
If needed, either the monitoring team responds, or it calls on its “social media first responders,” or subject experts scattered from throughout its staff of 14,300 employees, says Hamstra.
“They have a particular subject matter expertise where they might be able answer a question that those initial folks within our social [media] center can’t,” she says.
Three years ago, SAS began monitoring not only what is said about the company and its initiatives, but what its competitors and customers say about the topics SAS cares about, Hamstra says.
To establish share of voice, the social media team works closely with its marketing counterparts to gather analytics that provide insights to interested parties companywide. The team delves into platforms that include Twitter, news outlets, blogs, websites and even comments on blogs and articles.
SAS evaluates comments and conversation to identify how it is performing against its competitors in its core initiatives, including analytics, customer intelligence, data management and artificial intelligence. SAS also measures the overall volume of mentions. The social media team reports monthly to the marketing groups. Each quarter, the team also reports on share of voice to the chief marketing officer and his leadership team.
In June, SAS’ chief marketing officer encouraged the social media team to use its employee base to drive share of voice, Hamstra says. The team set a goal of increasing its number of mentions concerning AI and machine learning by 20 percent.
Pushing the message through its intranet and the team’s blog, SAS rallied its employee base, including 600 employee advocates who are trained on social media. They suggested hashtags to promote the company’s expertise in AI and machine learning.
SAS told the advocates, “We would love your help in getting this content out there,” Hamstra says. “This is why it’s important for the brand, and this is the challenge.”
The initiative succeeded. Hamstra thinks any company with the right tools could do the same. It begins, she says, with “looking closely at what are you listening to besides mentions of your own brand.”
When you are monitoring something as complicated as a major organization with multiple initiatives, start with core taxonomy, or a set of keywords important to you.
SAS has many products and competitors. In each area, taxonomies are will look vastly different, Hamstra says. Social media and communications can’t go it alone.
“Relying on those product marketing teams and field marketing teams to refine those taxonomies is crucial,” Hamstra says.
Similarly, you can’t remain passive—establishing the taxonomies and leaving the machine to hum along on its own. Continually refine the words and phrases you are monitoring.
