What is at the core of any Effective Social Media Monitoring Initiative?

I came across this article from Brand Quarterly, couple of weeks ago, on 5 steps for online protection of brand.

I have shared the link here for quick reference - http://www.brandquarterly.com/strategizing-brand-5-online-brand-protection-steps?ref=quuu
 
What really struck for me was how important point no 2 of ‘Monitor social media’ is and how central it is to all the other points. So the points mentioned here for making a case of Social media monitoring are:

1. While it is one of the biggest opportunities for business, it is a double-edged sword as it also poses one of the biggest threats to business.
2. Businesses need to register on social media sites, regardless of whether the platforms are giants or minnows, and proactively monitor across them in multiple languages for brand abuse, customer issues and any negative sentiment that needs to be dealt with
3. Monitoring should include sentiment analysis, rogue or fake sites selling your product, employee abuse, sites linking to unindexed sites in the Deep Web, and identifying fake profiles both for the brand and staff.

I believe that this is very simply put because the real world monitoring has to be more detailed with more layers to monitoring and importantly outline the actions that are required from real time monitoring to provide any meaningful benefits from this whole activity.

As can be seen from the above, it is the subsequent process and the actions that define how social media monitoring can drive different business benefits. In other words, it has very little to do with the monitoring activity per se but more to do what you do as a follow up to monitoring and collecting data.

And this is where an Enterprise Tool like QuickMetrix really makes the difference. All the above activities are seamlessly driven from a single interface that is not only intuitive but very easy to use.
In my last article, I had discussed the Influencer Management piece in detail. If you recollect, Monitoring was at the heart of Influencer management activity as well. It enables companies to continuously identify most engaged and most valuable influencers related to the brand / product /category. The important word to note is ‘continuously’, because it signifies that the identification of influencers is a process which is an ongoing and sustained in this ever expanding realm of social media volumes.

I will cover the adjoining block of competition benchmarking process in my next article.
For now, I want to leave you with the thought that whenever you hear any of the activities from the circular blocks above, do not forget that there is an underlying monitoring activity that is at the core and heart of it. This monitoring is mandatorily done by a high grade technology engine that relentlessly listens and crawls data across platforms and streams it into your system in near real time.
Without this, any social media activity is like throwing darts in the air with hope being your best strategy.