The Internet has made it easy for anybody to tell the world what they are thinking. That has effectively branded them as citizen journalists. That's also the reason for Internet to be known as social media because it allows anybody to communicate loudly to one another while allowing the whole world to hear their conversations. Brands have been monitoring their local newspapers just in case of any news which are detrimental to them. Most must have doing it religiously for several years. However, I seldom see any company in Asia monitoring the social media right now. They might have thought it is not important to monitor what the world is talking about them right now since they are not authenticated. However, it turned out that the social media is the very reason that convinces an Internet user to buy or not to buy any particular brand's product! 
That's why I thought of writing this post to convince anybody in the world who are the brand guardians that monitoring the social media is also very important! 1. Complaints Listen to the blogs. Listen to the Facebook notes. Listen to Facebook status. Listen to Twitter messages. There are many others out there which have broadcast complaints about your brand. They can be in the form of audio, video and article. The Bad Side: They might be the real reason that caused your sales to drop. They might be the real reasons why everybody is talking bad about your product. They might be the real reasons for attracting people to buy from your competitors. The Good Side: It's not true that complaints are necessarily bad. Complaints are in fact opportunities-in-disguise which allow you to convert even more prospects into customers if you know how. While the complaints are gathered around a blog post and everybody is discussing in the comments section, you can take this opportunity to find out more about the weaknesses there so that you can improve on your future products. You can also take this opportunity to resolve any issue over there and let them know that they are being taken care of. You can also use this opportunity to discover any unknown market within. There are just too much opportunities... It's only whether you see a glass is filled with half full of water, or half empty... 2. Compliments On the contrary, there are also compliments published in the social media. These groups of people are talking great stuff about you. They are your unofficial brand ambassadors. They are your great unbiased individuals who are willing to talk about you whenever anybody asked about them. They are probably your best people to bring brand awareness to the untapped segments. The Good Side: Obviously, compliments are for the good. Sometimes, they may over-emphasize on the goodness of your brand. However, we'll just leave it to them to have it their way since they don't represent the brand. The Bad Side: Because the web has made it easy for any minors to leverage on your brand to create an unofficial website, they may misrepresent what your brand is about. They may even misrepresent some of the products and services that you are providing. It makes things harder for the brands to handle because they are the hardcore fans out there. It's either they have to stop all the web activity, or they will embrace it while supporting them with materials. Which way is better? You choose! 3. Competitors It's good to find out what your competitors are doing online. It's becoming true that the web is the next media for brands to spend big bucks to create highly targeted awareness. The Good Side: Finding out what works and what doesn't, is a good way to find out from your competitors and follow the same. It helps to eliminate possibilities of failure. The Bad Side: The Internet is moving so fast. If you don't start anything online, your competitors' online exposure will grow better and better, while your brand could be forgotten and left on the shelf. (By the way, don't start abruptly for the sake of being on par with your competitors. It's not worthed it without a proper social media strategy.) 4. Returns on Investment (ROI) It doesn't matter whether you have started any online campaign or not. So long as you have started a campaign (online or offline), social media is a good place to find out about your ROI. For example, you may have done a roadshow. Or probably a promotion. Or to announce to the world about your new product launch. If it is something worthed talking about, you will soon have many high-trafficked websites talking about your campaign. They could be reviewing your campaign. They could be promoting your campaign. Or, they could be releasing this as a news to their readers. In return, you will get exposure of your brand, your products and your services. The Good: Brands love to be talked about. Especially when it is about something good. It is as good as doing an advertisement. We are talking about return of investment here. This kind of return is not really in the form of making a profit. It is about how much money has been saved if we were to do advertisement to get the same kind of exposure. The Bad: Again, if the campaign turned out to give bad impressions to the social media, it allows us to find out how detrimental it has caused. We will then find out how to pick up from where we have left, and work on improving it. 5. Crisis management purpose Talking about crisis management, the social media is also one of the areas which need to be monitored. When any company is facing any bad news rushing towards them, there must have some way to manage the online crisis. Some of the people did it by having confession video posts on YouTube. The Good: We will be able to identify some of the crisis on the web. There could be a major argument which centralizes on a certain brand. If this is not managed properly, it may cause disaster! The Bad: Without a proper management and experience, it may not be a good idea to deal with the situation directly. The usual way of dealing the situation is to side with one of the crowd and try to convince the whole situation to subside its seriousness. Whichever way, some form of online etiquette must be observed. 6. Managing the Influencers Identify the influencers on the web can be a good idea. Some websites have great influences which can affect the Internet public extremely. Find out what they have been talking about. If they are starting to talk about something bad about your brand, it can be very serious! The Good: The influential websites have a lot of loyal readers who believe 100% in whatever that they have to say. If you are in luck, they will start talking good about you when you send them press releases. The Bad: I have personally seen a brand which was humiliated thoroughly by an influential website after submitting a press release about their newly launched website. It causes this company to fumble towards changing their contents many times! Again, this is all about being in the social media long enough. If you have been reading Seth Godin's numerous marketing books, I think you should be safe in deploying the right website for the savvy crowd. 7. Managing the Crowd Influential websites are nobody if they don't gather crowd. The crowd are the driving force in the website and your product's "talkability". There must be something which the crowd wants to be part of the big conversation to talk about you. The Good: It's always good to know that the crowd is in good hands with the influencers talking good stuff about you. You probably have bought several banner advertisements from them to gain enough crowd into your websites too. The crowd is where the money is as well... The Bad: The crowd can be really sticky to the false statements and yet these statements are newsworthy. When things go really bad with the crowd being led astray, it will eventually be seen on Twitter and personal blogs everywhere. Fake things will soon be cooked to become the truth. You probably need to do something about it! 8. Optimised search results Google/Yahoo/Bing search engines may not be considered as "social media". However, they are the ones which can lead us to the social media. Basically, they are instrumental to the born of social media. Hence, they must be mentioned as well. With proper search engine optimization, a website may be shown as one of the relevant results even though it is not an expert in the field. That's the beauty about the Internet. They can't really rank any particular website to be on the top just because they are expert. And because of this, some websites may not be showing bad reviews of your products to the visitors from the search engines. The Good: If you are good at SEO, you may be able to optimize certain keywords for your websites. You will not only enjoy good traffic to your website, your visitors will be most likely interested in your products and services since they have been looking high and low for them on the search engines. The Bad: However, when your targeted keywords are optimized by your competitors or someone who hates you, it can be disastrous! 9. Trendy search results Another upcoming search is based on trends which are found in Twitter, Technorati, Google blogsearch, FriendFeed and even Facebook. These are the search engines which are embedded as part of the social media. It is a very powerful tool which can allow anyone to find out what the social media is talking about right now which are probably newsworthy. The Good: There is a reason why your keywords will alert you about what the social media is talking about you. You will be able to use it to your advantage by reacting accordingly. The Bad: The trend search results may not show relevant results. It can be frustrating to find irrelevant results. However, with a little patience, you will find a lot of treasure out of it. Some ideas which you probably may not have thought of yourself! 10. Auditing Brand is fast becoming a living thing by itself as nobody can really control it like a puppet. The corporate behind the brand cannot control the brand communications as effectively as in the past where it used to be a one-way communication. With Web 2.0, the consumers also have a way about the brand as well. Everybody can contribute and tell the world what this brand is all about. As brand guardians, it is fast becoming hard to protect our brand from attacks. Especially when the attacks come from our customers. The Good: With a good audit of the brand communication in the social media, we will be able to understand how the world wants to look at this particular brand. And how we can morph ourselves to show the brand in the way that the crowd wants it to be. It not only helps a corporate to understand how it should be branded, it also brings the brand closer to the customers up to a one-to-one distance. The Bad: After finding out how the brand has been perceived, there will be a lot of work to be done. First of all, we have to understand and repair whatever damages it has done to the public. While working on it, we may cause even more trouble if we didn't manage it properly. Brand is a living thing by itself. It has its own life which we have to work out correctly. It's an imaginary creature which has no actual form... Hence, some online experience is good to get a better understand of the online etiquette. Conclusion Well, I hope you have been able to understand better about the reasons for monitoring the social media. If you do have your own opinions or questions, do let us know in the comments. I will be happy to answer them as much as I can. I am currently reading Chris Brogan's "Trust Agents". Do check him out as he has produced a fantastic book for us to understand about being a trust agent on the web. Photo credits: dsevilla | 
