Benefits and return on investment from online reputation monitoring

According to Carol Rozzwell and Bill Gassman at Gartner, some of the reasons and benefits of analysing social networks include:

 Reduction in support costs

 Better engagement with customers

 The ability to find influencers outside of the main customer base

 Finding opportunities and detecting threats

 Identify fraud


 Discovering new ideas


 SEO


 To better understand language and behaviour of the customer


 Brand protection


 Identifying bottlenecks and underused expertise


 Identifying and mitigating issues with new product launches


 Managing change


The following represents a list of the most common uses for social media analytics:

•   Competitive intelligence. Online reputation monitoring tools can help you monitor how your competitors are perceived by the market. These programmes can tell you what proactive social marketing efforts your competitors have made.
  You may even want to track the competition’s social media representatives, including keeping an eye on what events they are attending and how often are they tweeting. Following the competition is an easy way to benchmark your social media marketing strategy.
  
  
•   Market reaction. Not only is it important to know how your brand is viewed in your particular market, but also how it is viewed by important outside observers. For example, monitoring your brand name can be a useful source of feedback about a new product launch or re-branding.
  
  
•   Product development support. Social media analytics can help you find all of the uses of your product, good or bad. It can also highlight the features that customers love, hate and use differently from how product managers originally envisioned.
  
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    Great customer service. Satisfaction or dissatisfaction is the most common type of sentiment your customers will express about your brand. Social media analytics will not only allow you to find those comments quickly, but to respond instantaneously, helping to stop bad press from spreading farther. If you have a company with a customer service team in place, consider getting a dashboard system that has a workflow option. Having a workflow option will allow your team members to seamlessly share and save notes on particular influences.
  
  
•   Sentiment analysis is a great KPI for brands to track. Is the brand being discussed at all on social media platforms? If so, what are people saying about it? And is it the brand itself being discussed, or is it the product lines? For instance, your customers may not be a fan of Nestlé, but they may love talking Kit Kat on Facebook.
  
   Feedback system for offline marketing performance. Online monitoring can be a good way to gauge the reaction of your latest TV ad. Social buzz is an inexact but useful tool for evaluating how ads are perceived; what clicks, what doesn’t, what unexpected thoughts come up in the comments of people who have viewed or heard about the ads?

Social media monitoring has a number of distinct advantages over traditional research methods:

•   Instantaneous feedback. Unlike alternative market research methods, which rely on the power of focus groups and surveys, social media analytics can paint an instant picture of how consumers view your brand.
  
•   Unbiased. Data from most types of research is structured around the type of questions asked, but social media monitoring allows researchers to glean unstructured data from their respondents, making it possible to learn even the unarticulated demands of a particular market. Using online monitoring tools can help to find what else consumers are interested in.
  
  Used effectively, online reputation monitoring can help a business:
  

•   Improve customer satisfaction and perceptions of brand by creating opportunities to engage with consumers and show that feedback is being listened to.
  
  • –  Gain insights from consumers about what is good and what is bad about products or services.
    
  • –  Gain insights about competitors and their customers’ perceptions about their products and services.
    
    
•   Maintain shareholder value through effective risk management.
  
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    Protect business by having ears close to the ground where opinions about a business are being formed and propagated.
  
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    Engage in more effective PR by understanding who the real influencers are.
  
  • –  Gain understanding of the online ecosystem in which an organisation is operating.
    
  • –  Understand the echo-chamber relationship between user-generated content and traditional forms of online media, e.g. news, broadcast, trade media.
    
  • –  Aid crisis management and planning.
    
  • –  Provide early warning systems for reactive and defensive PR.
    
    
•   Increase sales by improving the company offering based on what consumers are saying about you.
  
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    Reduce marketing spend by learning how to reach out to customers more cheaply. – Find customers in the right place.
  – Target consumers with a better-resonating message.
  
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    Reduce internal costs by employing services which save time and effort.
  – Technology can help to trawl through information quickly.
  – Informed and actionable insights can help a business make better decisions.
  
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    Help identify gaps for products and services which can be developed for profitable niche markets.
  
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    Better SEO will result in more traffic and less need to invest in paid search.
  – Insights into online networks and key phrases found in user-generated content can
  aid attempts to bolster natural search.
  Depending on the approach, social analytics can tell you a lot about your brand and industry. The text-mining algorithm is continuously improving and social media platforms are collecting new types of data.