online monitoring

Increasingly, companies take interest in the business opportunities presented by online monitoring. For those new to online monitoring its often confusing to separate social media analytics from traditional media outlets.

Basically, online monitoring is the process of tracking online conversations on “hot topics” in the social media space. It is addressing the challenge of monitoring hundreds of millions of pages and conversations on websites, forums, blogs, podcasts, videos, social networks etc.

Often, Google is the first stop when doing research on what people are saying about a particular topic. Although a powerful tool, Google has its limitations, namely;

• Only 1,000 results are displayed for any given keyword or search phrase and difficult to find the context and influence of a given result.
• Results are only sporadically updated and there's no rime or reason as to whether something of interest makes it into the top 10 or the top 100
• Cumbersome to track activity on a timeline (trending)

Google is a great staring point for any general type of research however. It is and will for ever by a B2C tool and not particularly well suited for professional B2B. As an online monitoring tool Google cannot not provide the level of insight, notification, tracking, analysis or reporting that is required on a professional level.

In particular marketing & advertising, PR, market research and product development departments will benefit from keeping up with the latest trends in online media.

The marketing department may use online monitoring tools to research consumer issues about a product or service. Insights can then be used to create a marketing campaign addressing the concerns raised by the consumers. Also, the market research and product development team may use social media research to find discussions on product malfunctions and features being sought for future models. PR departments often use online monitoring to track bloggers and other influencial conversations in order to quickly react and manage negative publicity. Furthermore, online monitoring is also a an effective way to measure effectiveness of PR and marketing campaigns.

So, time to start your own online monitoring strategy, go to Imooty.eu and register now!