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Don’t confine Social Media Monitoring to a rainy Friday afternoon

Business | Technology

The prevalence and immediacy of social media means that companies can no longer confine media monitoring to a rainy Friday afternoon, yet a staggering 80% of PR departments spend fewer than four hours per week tracking mentions of their brand – or that of their clients - online.

That’s the surprising result of a recent survey of 376 agencies and departments conducted by Daryl Willcox publishing – the full results of which can be found here

The abundance of free tracking tools should make life comparatively easier for those in the PR industry, at least compared to the days of trawling through numerous clippings, hours of collating and manual analysis for senior management, but still it seems to be of minimal importance.

Social media, however, has moved monitoring away from being a once-per-week activity and instead demands a more frequent approach. Its 24/7 nature means that keeping tabs on what bloggers, tweeters and online forums are saying about your brand has to be a continuous process.

For some, though, monitoring is still not even registering on the radar with a shocking 14.6% of those surveyed admitting to not monitoring coverage at all. Over half use the excuse of not having the resource to do it while a quarter of them say that they don’t know how to do it. At least, encouragingly, nearly 90% say that they would consider social media monitoring if there was more information available. I still find it hard to believe that there are still people who haven’t explored the basic free services like Google news alerts.

In PR, monitoring is the only way of measuring the success, or indeed lack of success, of your communications programmes. It is also a way of pre-empting crises or issues that might affect the reputation of your brand online.

Admittedly, the Daryl Wilcox survey only covers a small cross-section of PR departments but it highlights that even among those PR departments who do monitor online it is not being done frequently or thoroughly enough. The fact that there are PROs who freely admit that they do not conduct any online monitoring at all is a fundamental oversight and an even bigger concern.

Chris Hughes

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