After examining the different LinkedIn groups that touch on this subject, it’s clear that not one discusses strategic online listening in a general way. Actually, most groups are directly linked to a monitoring platform.

My goal is to fill the void and, much like the @all4monitoring twitter account we’ve got going, create a destination where we can discuss all related topics, stories and case studies, albeit in a much more in-depth manner.

Right now, you’ll see that there are a couple of news feeds being pulled into the group. These are mostly from different social media monitoring company blogs. If you have suggestions for others, I’d be happy to add those as well. There are already a few discussion thread open, but, obviously, I’d love to see you add your own. And make sure to add your name and info to the “Roll Call” thread, which is designed to help everyone get to know each other.

On “Social Media Monitoring Mondays”, we’ll start a new thread and encourage a new discussion every week. We’ll try to make these threads timely, topical and relevant to current news.

To share information emerging from this group, please use the #SMMLI (Social Media Monitoring LinkedIn) hashtag. Don’t be shy to spread the joy!

Also, we invite you to learn more about monitoring at socialmediamonitoring.ca. This site delivers an easy-to-read explanation of the importance of listening and its Social Media Monitoring Tool Directory (#smmtd) has often been cited for being one of the most comprehensive lists of monitoring services on the web. In fact, there are now over 115 free and paid tools indexed there.

Hope to see you on LinkedIn. I look forward to making the Social Media Monitoring group active and vibrant!

Specifically, one of the findings stood out to me:

Among some 20 online activities surveyed that can be tied back to social media behaviour, two are particularly meaningful:

• Two-thirds of Internet users turn to online information about products, brands or companies that have been produced by family, friends, colleagues and others they don’t know personally.

• 30% have shared something online about a brand or a company in the past week. More specifically, 20% have cited a company or brand in a personal web page or blog. They are the only group that finds advertising as useful as social brand content, and a lot more likely to join various types of sponsored communities

Of course, this has many significant meanings for brand managers and the agencies responsable:

1. You’re no longer in control of your message. (If you haven’t heard that before, it’s time you did.)
2. People are planting seeds on your behalf around the web and it’s up to you to know where they’re talking and what they’re saying, as their positive and/or negative comments can have a profound impact on purchasing decisions.

As a result, you must start a strategic social media monitoring and response program. Without one in place, the public becomes your brand’s manager and, due to the shelf life of search, anyone who can type your product/service name into Google can be influenced by what’s already been said. It’s on you to find the relevant conversations and join in, so you can correct wrongs and misconceptions and have your point of view on record.

So, do you know what they are saying about your brand?

However, what a lot of people aren’t thinking about are all the other reasons why they could be monitoring online conversations. After all, it’s one thing to use a monitoring platform to guide your online participation. It’s a completely different thing, though, to collect information for a wide range of reasons.

Over the next few posts, we’ll be taking a look at the different reasons why social media monitoring isn’t just for monitoring social media. For example…

It’s to help you gain business intelligence.

• Generate leads
Beyond engaging in social media and being ready to act on leads generated through participation, you can learn a lot by listening. Keep your ears open and look for issues people are having with your competitors, needs expressed online, news of events related to your service offering and RFPs that are coming through.

• Keep an eye on your competitors
Knowing what your competitors are up to can help you decide how to differentiate your offer. Run keywords that are directly connected to your competitors’ executives to see what they’re doing. Listen to conversations related to their brands to learn what people are thinking about it and to identify its flaws. Consider listening in on their employees, because you never know what nugget of insight they’ll drop in your lap.

• Feel out the issues facing your industry
Listen to industry keywords to learn what influential people industry wide are thinking. Figure out some of the trends that will affect your business. Learn the language people are using to discuss the field and reflect that back in the messages you prepare.

• Gain key product development insights
People will often give you unsolicited feedback on how you can make things better. Whether it’s in customer service, supply chain, or the product itself, keep an eye out for clues on how to better meet the expectations of your users.

How do you use social media monitoring to gain business intelligence?

You see, in February 2007 I was contacted by their president, also named Mark Goren, to discuss our “Google problem.” Since that first chat, we’ve become friends, done a little work together, and continue to serve as each others’ mentor.

The guest post talks about the importance of filtering out bad information from social media monitoring to collect results that are most relevant to your search strategy. Using the example of our name, I illustrate how to do so through simple search.

Why does this relate to planting seeds? Because the more content you produce through different social networks or the more you’re being written about, it’s vital to know where conversations are taking place if you want to manage your reputation online. In some cases, it may even make you want to distinguish your name somehow, to help make it easier to search for. Cleveland’s Mark Goren did so by using his middle initial, which you can see on the right sidebar on P2P’s blog.

Mark is a great guy and the team at Point To Point is at the top of their game. I encourage you to learn a little bit about them, their award-winning work and their unique charity, Change for $20, which they launched last year for the holidays.

To learn about how Mark and I met, read this old post.

To read today’s guest post, head on over to P2P’s blog.

To check out Change for $20 (which is probably the first thing you should do), visit the site.

As I wrote in the original post, and still believe very strongly today:

The world is smaller than ever. People are meeting new people and making new friends every day. It’s all about reaching out, connecting and making meaningful relationships. Last night’s chat was just one more powerful example.

And so is today’s guest post.

No matter which social media monitoring platform you’re committed to, use others as well.

True insight comes from using several different kinds of search engines, applications and tools. That’s not a knock on the different services, it’s reflective of the monitoring environment’s reality. By using several of the different services available – mostly for no added cost – you’ll uncover deeper intelligence, greater statistics and a better understanding of the conversation.

There may be any number of reasons for this logic, whether you’re committed to paid or free tools:

• Every algorithm is different. While one tool may be capturing certain conversations quickly, another tool may be filling in the blanks in a more timely way. By cross checking different engines, you’ll be able to catch more results sooner.

• Even if you’re using a robust, feature-rich service, there are likely many different insights that the service doesn’t incorporate. Take Twitter, for example. You’re collecting tweets, but are able to drill down about the user, who the person is connected to, since when they’ve been on Twitter, frequency of Tweets, which links they’ve posted, what pictures they’ve linked to, and so on and so on and so on? The more tools you use, and some offer very specific functionalities, the greater you’ll come to understand a particular conversation.

• Backup your main monitoring service with others, just in case. In case your system is going offline for maintenance. In case results turn up missing. In case you don’t have access to a wifi network. For example, through you may be using a web based service, you may want to download mobile applications – Tweetie and Say What? come to mind – to check in while you’re away from your computer.

• Sentiment analysis. Different services go about providing this analysis in different ways. Some automate the process, relying on different “trigger” words to reach a conclusion, others assign sentiment through human analysis, while still others leave it all up to you. As a result, if you like so many of the features offered by the platform you’re committed to, but don’t “trust” how it handles sentiment, you may want to go in a different direction to gain an accurate measure.

• Unless your platform allows you to add custom RSS sources, which helps ensure that you’re not missing any results, you’ll have to find different ways to keep track of these other results.

These are just some of what could be a very long list. And in no way is this post meant to diminish the importance of finding your comfort zone with a primary platform and sticking to it. That said, a single social media monitoring platform just isn’t enough if you really want to get more out of your monitoring program.

So, I ask you, what combination of sites, tools and applications are you using? Need ideas, here’s an exhaustive directory of social media monitoring tools that will show you the potential of what’s out there.