Social media monitoring article

I know Friday tends to be my day of sharing but I've come across a couple of things to do with social media in the last couple of days which probably deserve to be highlighted sooner rather than later.

The buzz of buzz monitoring

The perfect example of buzz monitoring lit up my day yesterday and highlighted the benefits of using the system. Caped crusader Batman was years ahead of his time on this when he created the batsignal to alert him to big news long before the days of email, but besides the nuisance of sliding down a pole and donning an irritaintgly tight superhero outfit, the buzz of my alert felt, I imagine much the same.

An alert before the alert

In the main, you can quite easily tell the difference between someone who is actively monitoring prospects and someone who is not. Someone who isn't will see a breaking headline like 'Company A holding a pitch' or 'Company A seeking new contractor' and assume it's a good thing. Someone who is tracking prospects will see this as an opportunity lost.

"Social media acts as an early warning system when something goes wrong"

Fantastic to read a really insightful article on the BBC this week about companies shifting the consumer power of social media sites to benefit themselves. It was especially interesting to see social media referred to as a CRM system in itself and the argument that social media not only acts as a way of putting out early fires with customers, but triggers companies to beat journalists to a damaging story as well. At the end of the day, even if a story isn't necessarily true, if a big source gets hold of a rumour and spreads it to the masses, the damage is already done.