In safeguarding corporate reputation over the cyber space, the efficacy of social listening and social media monitoring is integrally paramount. Interestingly, about a decade back, when Facebook was in infancy and Twitter was not born, these lexicons were rarely heard in the corporate corridors. Hardly anyone would disagree - it was Twitter that was primarily responsible for the origin of the functions or faculty, now known as social listening and monitoring. What started as short bursts of inconsequential information or some meaningless chirps or chatter, soon became huge social micro-blogging hub. While Facebook, at least initially, represented the social gregariousness over web, the tweets generated the real-time buzz and pronounced opinions and judgments on any or everything at a viral spread. Soon, similar tools swarmed the zone of digital socialization at an unprecedented speed. The new breed of thought-leaders, trend-setters, influencers virally fanned the internet with ‘hashtags’, ‘trending topics’, and ‘likes’ and ‘dislikes’, causing substantial volatility to the reputation barometer in the corporate landscape. Thus, the mechanics of digital reputation management got speedily reshaped and redefined. Now, the world is cruising on the Web 2.0 highway, with the dynamic user-generated contents and the social-media buzz governing the company’s most expensive, yet fragile, intangible asset known as reputation. Another evolution that has exponentially multiplied its outcome is the proliferation and widespread use of mobile devices.

The art and science of social listening, now forming the recipe for digital reputation management, is still on its evolutionary track. Most of the companies, conscious of their brand reputation, have put some methodology and mechanism in action to gauge the volume and trend – positive or negative - of online conversations around their brands. Most of them have a reasonably good understanding and appreciation for the value of the social data and what they mean for the reputation of the company.

This is not to suggest that social listening will eventually replace the strategy and methodology of conventional business intelligence gathering, already an ever-evolving and expanding area of information technology and business intelligence research. What is important is the recognition of the powerful role of social listening and social web monitoring. Needless to emphasize, the online ‘social intelligence’ is speedily emerging as an important ingredient in decision making to complement the traditional BI analytics.

One important challenge in handling the pile of social data is its unstructured mass, its abundance and diversity of the sources like wikis, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, review sites, news-feed and others. Apart from mining the terabytes of data, it involves the tasks of separating the meaningful contents from the superfluous noise, invoking the right tool-set of intelligence and analytics to derive the true actionable business insights. As social media generates a complex information map, the analysts need to segregate and differentiate between the primary sources (say, stakeholders, experts, competitors) and the secondary ones like blogs, articles and others. The social media listening and monitoring and the associated intelligence research follow some distinctive phases – (i) mapping the social agents (i.e., people) and conversations, where conversations represent the raw unquantifiable data, (ii) engaging and tracking, which involve use of analytical tools and network of experts and trend spotters to create dynamic maps that focus where information and expertise reside and track through accepted metrics,(iii) structuring and mining – these processes pertain to putting the turbulent stream of molten data into some structure through some tools and extracting, mining the qualitative insights from the data pool, (iv) curating and embedding, which encompass inclusion of the new actionable thinking in the strategic frame of the organization in on-going basis and finally, curating and archiving the pertinent information as the knowledge-assets for future.

In due course, in some different blog-posts we will discuss the aforesaid phases in detail. Let us focus on the best practices in respect to social listening and monitoring to safeguard reputation, an intangible asset or capital the way you conceptualize it. Let us clarify some distinctions, because social listening and monitoring are not same. By listening, we mean gathering social media conversations and data, and drawing behavioral and trending intelligence reports containing actionable information. But, social monitoring focuses on the process of following, tracking and surveying the pertinent conversations on-going basis (and, if required, participating in such conversations in the framework of guidelines and rules). One important aspect of ‘monitoring’ is its scope, the segmented focus – ‘What specific area it is tracking?’ Which customer group is voicing the complaint?’ In comparison, ‘listening’ has a broader focus and it tries to gauge the patterns, trends and study the emerging theme. Also, the spotlight of monitoring is set on ‘what’ is happening, or ‘how the status changes’. On the other hand, listening encapsulates a framework of analytics that tries to link and sync the cause with the effect. In spite of the articulated difference, one point needs to be driven home. Keeping the analytical perspective in context, rather than emphasizing the boundary of definition, it is essential to recognize the complementarity, interoperability and mutual interdependence of the both the functions. In other words, there is no sin in inter-referencing both the terms with some reasonable liberty.

One needs to remember that there are several drivers and contributors that govern different aspects of reputation management. When we are discussing the linkages between social listening and monitoring, it is just one of the spokes of that giant wheel. Social listening and monitoring, to meaningfully contribute to the management of corporate reputation, should cover the four stage processes.

Identification (of conversations)
Interpretation and Evaluation
Escalation
Response

What do we mean by ‘Identification’? The process of identification of the relevant online dialogues and conversations is the primary step for any organization. It should be informed of the ‘smoldering’ reputation risks and issues. This calls for setting up effective processes and methodologies, both for listening and monitoring social media data. The initial step necessary for identification of the pertinent conversations is ‘research’, where the organization needs to commit its due diligence. In the digital space, the most important research process is characterized by Keyword Research. Right ‘keywords’ are the seeds, or the key elements for the search queries, which extract the search results. There are several free tools (Google, Bing, Wordstream etc ), as well as paid ones (Keywordspy, SEMrush, Keyword Discovery etc) in the market for keyword research. After the right keywords are identified, they need to be assimilated into the raw keyword queries to be planted into the listening and monitoring tools. Let me emphasize, the crucial components for the listening and monitoring programs are the individual keyword queries, which incorporate the semantics and logic of Boolean language. The Boolean language offers the ways to bind the keywords logically, based on what results are expected. In short, Boolean language enables the logical expressions based on the mathematical constructs of set theory.[ We may later devote another article in discussing the Boolean logic and the associated programing semantics.]

Choosing the right social monitoring tool is definitely what matters next. For meaningful reputation management, one needs to select effective tools. There are plethora of social monitoring tools, with varied strengths, weaknesses, specialties and price ranges. There are some good free tools or sites like Google Alerts, Twitter, Addictomatic, Topsy, IceRocket; but free tools may not have the advanced features and right bells and whistles. For tapping into social media conversations, there are some well-known paid tools including Radian6, Alteran SM2, Sysomos, collective Intellect, and Lithium.

Necessary to point out, a good set of keywords and good toolset are not enough to ensure proper monitoring. It calls for suitable human skills and efforts in scheduling, presenting, analyzing and interpreting the results. To gather right insights from monitoring and listening the results should be structured with requisite variables and parameters. For example, the data should be well segmented on Demographics (Who), Channels (Where), Semantics (What and Why) and Sentiments (Positive/ Negative/ Indifferent), Conversation Trends (When). The standard business connotations apply for ‘Demographics’ and ‘Channels, the ‘Semantics’ provide the capability to map themes and the meaning of the conversations. ‘Sentiment’ recognizes the emotions, as emitted off the conversations. By ‘Trends’ we mean the direction, trajectory and the swings of the conversation over its shelf-life. (Yes, no conversation runs perennially, it has a life-cycle.) After gathering the insights, we move to the next stage, which has to do with interpretation and evaluation.

In the interpretation and evaluation phase, we are purely in the ‘listening’ framework. (In the previous phase ‘Identification’, the social monitoring has played the major role.) Regardless of whether a network of experts, or a command center, or an individual, identifies the issue or the social signal breaking online, the immediate steps are to interpret it in the context of the reality, and then evaluate the seriousness. There are three factors to be considered for interpretation, labeling and ranking of any social signal.

What is said, its seriousness or severity score.
Who says it, his social authority, influence potentiality.
How often it is said – its frequency, visibility, viral or not.

Every social signal, particularly ones with negative emotions, call for dedicated and impartial fact checking. The organization, through its right diagnostics, should honestly and ethically delve deep into the matter and check the veracity in the perception. Any mistake here can have far fetching and catastrophic impact. Next, assessing the severity of the signal is quite important. Every organization should have its own model for assessing the importance and severity, and there are some well-established guidelines and literature to guide that modelling. Also, it is important to reckon who is saying it - the ‘influence’ of an individual is not manifested merely by the ‘irrefutability’ of the facts claimed on web, but his robust online authority and ‘social following’ significantly matter in swaying the perceptions at large. Coming to ‘how often it is said’, the frequency of the ‘shouts’ generated by the signal/issue is an important factor to consider before formulating the response plan, particularly its strategy and immediacy.

After interpretation and evaluation, the next stage is ‘Escalation’. Some may argue that escalation does not fall within the frame of social monitoring and listening. But who else - apart from the informed team who monitors and listens - can effectively escalate it? The important point here is to determine who needs to know about the immediacy of the issue/crisis and how quickly they need to know. Different organizations structure their escalation process in their own ways. In some places, the social media monitoring team is entrusted with authority of skipping the normal channel or the hierarchy of levels and reaching straight to the top executive, depending on the seriousness and immediacy of the crisis. The final step is the ‘response’. Once the issue got escalated and the recovery or response team is in readiness, it calls for two immediate concerns/questions to be addressed based on the social data gathered: - Do they need to respond? If so, what is the modality of the response? - What needs to change? It may not be the social media team that launches the response activities, but they play the advisory roles. They regularly check the velocity of social coverage and recommend the right response strategy and remediation mechanism. Also, sometimes they draw the blueprint for the response and the guidelines for addressing the concerns of social stakeholders, who are at the vortex of the buzz or the criticism.

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