Monitoring Our Influences

For everyone in my Social Media for PR class (#COMM3309), we know tomorrow is the lucky day when most of our projects are due. In addition, it's also the amazing day when our social media audits are due. After stressing out all weekend, I took a break and decided to complete my weekly blogs. While I was reading through Brian Solis' Engaged, I realized how much this chapter relates to the social media audit project we have been working on for the past four weeks.

I didn't really understand what "social media monitoring" was, nor did I see it's importance. Solis provides a good background look at social media monitoring. He refers to monitoring as the eyes, ears, and heart o the organization. I did not realize how true this was until after I completed my audit. If I was running a company, I would be monitoring all over the web. It was fascinating to be able to tap into conversations and actually see what people were talking about. Normally, we only rely on what we hear from friends and families. Social media monitoring offers a completely new way to "assess" a company. In addition, it definitely shows where the company needs to improve.

For my social media audit, I chose a local business in Austin. After monitoring the company for a substantial amount of time, I thought of a number of a different ways that the company could improve their social media and thus increase business.

Solis also encourages listening. Sure, we can all read what customers are saying, but are we really listening to their opinions? By listening and taking customers opinions into action, the company can:

- grow
-learn
- create and ideate
- humanize
- enhance processes
- expand market share
- improve products and services

Solis provides even more outcomes from listening in chapter 19 of Engage. Listening not only benefits the clients, but the company as a whole. If it's a win-win situation, why aren't more organizations doing this? Maybe they do not know how. Solis goes on to teach us how to social media monitor and provides a number of websites and tools to help develop a strong monitoring campaign.

Friendfeed, Collecta, Hootsuite, and Twitter search were just a few of the tools Solis listed. After completing my audit, I wish I had used a few of these other tools in my Yahoo! pipe. By engaging in more online sources, the company can find more feedback and information on the internet.

Overall, this chapter was very informative and useful for the social media audit. My only concern is that it was just a little too late. With the social media audit due tomorrow, I cannot use a lot of the tools that Solis provided. However, this will be very useful if I ever run monitor another company.