As a result of our common interests and experiences in social media, brand and marketing, John Cass and I met through Twitter. Last week we had the opportunity to compare notes by telephone. During that conversation it became evident to me that John is indeed a brand champion. He agreed to share some of his thoughts with us today about how organizations can use social media monitoring to measure brand monitoring.


"I’ve been monitoring how companies use social media for marketing since 2003, when I first started my blog PR Communications (http://pr.typepad.com). Today I’ve become interested in how companies build the necessary infrastructure to manage social media engagement, but also how social media engagement and monitoring is integrated into CRM. To write about the theme of social CRM integration, I’d like to describe how a company might use social media monitoring to measure brand monitoring:

"What if a company was able to segment how their market perceives their product by each brand experience? Wouldn't such an ability to segment enable a company to guide product development by keeping tabs on the pulse of the marketplace, and how a company is measuring up to the competition in the market place? Using social media monitoring technology a company would be able to determine the volume of conversations around each brand experience. In addition the volume of conversation around each brand experience could be tied to a vendor/competitor in the marketplace.

"However, the volume of conversation around a brand experience or competitor may not be an indicator of success. One or two competitors who have a significant volume of conversation, but those conversations might have a lot of negative sentiment. Therefore it’s important also to segment competitor brand experience conversations using social media monitoring tools, and at the same time measure the sentiment of each brand experience by competitor. Here, we'd show a bar chart for each brand experience, sentiment rating (positive/negative/negative-positive) by each competitor in the marketplace.

"Looking at the volume of conversations, the sentiment about brand experience and as they relate to a competitor will a company to determine what the most important brand experiences are for customers within the market, and how each competitor measures up by conversation market share and sentiment rating. Using this information a company might then model its product development strategies on the volume of conversations around brand experiences and the competitive landscape. We'd track the progress of the conversations around each brand experience by competitor. As the company runs campaigns the company would be able to track how each campaign influences the marketplace.

"Using social media monitoring software in this way, a company can conduct initial and ongoing market and competitive intelligence, one, to manage strategy, and two, to track progress. This data gives companies a macro view of the marketplace, but by using social CRM software, a company could then use the monitoring software to connect with customers and leaders in the industry, by managing those interactions using a CRM system that integrates social media monitoring software results."

John Cass is the author of Strategies and Tools for Corporate Blogging (http://www.amazon.com/Strategies-Too...e=UTF8&s=books) , and a Research Fellow with the Society for New Communications. 


John, thank you so much for taking time to share with us some of your work, you truly are the Brand Champion of the Day! For anyone interested in social media, you should check out John's work.