Having an online presence requires online skills. PR professionals master the art or learn about how to make bloggers write about the company they work for, how to communicate with clients using Twitter, how to use corporate YouTube channels, how to create successful Facebook fan pages and so on.
But with thousands of people engaging in the online medium monitoring what is being said about a company is an issue. While monitoring agencies can deal with both offline (TV, radio and press) and online monitoring there are some free tools PR pros can use for an in-house online monitoring. I will briefly present four of them which I find handy to some extent: Technorati, Twitter search, Google Alerts, and RSS.
Technorati – allows key word and tag search in sites, blogs, posts, and news while filtering can be made by fields (entertainment, business, sports, politics etc) or by authority! (influence in the blogosphere).
Twitter search – specialist search engine for Twitter based on key words. The advanced search function allows search by words, people, places, dates, attitudes! and other.
Google Alerts – provides e-mail updates based on selected key words. User can choose from news, blogs, video, groups, and comprehensive (multiple sources) opting for frequency of updates (as it happens, once a day, once a week).
RSS – subscribers to RSS receive updated information on subjecst of interest under the form of the so-called feeds. RSS are available for websites, blog posts, comments, online publications etc.
By using these tools PR pros can have an idea about what is being blogged, tweeted and commented about a particular company, event, topic, person etc. Not only can they track references about a company but they can also monitor competitors and other industry-related subjects.
One can now easily say that “Monitoring has never been easier thanks to all these online tools.” This may not be necessarily true…Although some of the instruments provide web pages monitoring in many languages sometimes they fail to effectively show the expected results. For example Google Alerts set for Romanian language offers e-mail updates with stories published even years ago! Moreover, receiving and gathering all the online references about the topic of interest are just the first step. Companies need to allocate human resources to filter all the information (in order to eliminate “spam”) and organize it.
Bottom line – online monitoring tools are of great help but they do have some limitations.
Picture: Interactive Insights Group
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I think online monitoring is giving PR pros and businesses in general a fantastic opportunity to listen to what people have to say, get to know the consumers and engage in conversation. They offer companies a great opportunity to receive free, fast and unmediated feedback and use that intelligence to help change and control audience perceptions and preferences. Online presence is becoming vital to cultivating relationships, keeping in touch with the latest changes and events or even avoiding potential crises. Not using the tools that you've mentioned has the potential to remove PR practitioners and their clients from the decision-making funnel of their audiences.
ReplyDeleteHowever, you are right to say that there are several limitations, either in the technological nature of these tools or in the methodologies, analysis and skills that they require from those using them. The monitoring options have been expanded thanks to the digital environment, but so has their complexity. For agencies that rely heavily on these online tools what happens when the Internet connection goes down in the office or there is a power shortage for the day? And this is just one of many possible scenarios of things that can go wrong.
Apart from the language issue that you've mentioned, some other challenges that I think online monitoring poses are the representative sampling issue (non-response bias is a huge issues for Twitter data for example) and the contextualization of the users. Twitter stats and monitoring tools, for example, offer services that categorize tweets according to certain key words as negative or positive mentions. But they can't really understand the context on that particular mention, the socio-economic and cultural background of the user, and things like irony, sarcasm or slang don't really translate.
One other thing that comes to mind is the saying that "Computers have been invented to solve problems that people wouldn't have had they not existed." I'm guessing this can be easily applied to the all sorts of online tools, for monitoring or other purposes, that people use today.
You have outlined the methods of monitoring very well and I was not aware of most of them so I have learned something new.
ReplyDeleteI can see that the methods of monitoring, whilst useful in seeing what people are looking at, suffer from the same problem as monitoring the print media. Whilst you can monitor what is being read you can not effectively monitor the level of absorption or measure levels of attitude change.
However, this said, digital media does allow the prospect of monitoring what people say in response to what they read online i.e. comments on blogs. So in a way effective monitoring of digital media etc can prove more penetrative than monitoring of print media. The crux of the matter is with so much material online and in so many different forms a PR operation is going to have a hard time finding it all let alone crunching the results down into useful data.
@ Roxana Good point – online monitoring is a great opportunity to listen to clients, get to know consumers and directionally communicate with them.
ReplyDeleteThe scenario you mentioned is so true but I have to mention that both online and offline PR is very much dependent on the internet and power supply:)
Indeed Twitter search can reveal negative and positive mentions (using the “attitude” search function I mentioned) without providing context. It is however a good starting point for interpreting what individuals think and feel about a particular issue.
@ Craig I am glad you learned something new and hopefully you will find the tools handy.
Speaking about comments, they are not only subject to monitoring but also to evaluation. They are a great source to assess what people think about a particular story generated through online PR. And I am talking about qualitative evaluation not only about quantitative one. I am actually going to write about evaluating online PR efforts in a future post:)