Five steps to fantastic social media monitoring

"Social media monitoring" may sound complicated, but in truth, it's not rocket science. You don't need a $5,000-a-month PR firm or even a marketing degree to do it. More than anything, it takes a few of the right tools, a fierce dedication to listening and a desire to understand your clientele rather than sell directly to them.

Sound easy? It is.

But lest you cast the task to your lowliest marketing intern, note the word "dedication" in the last paragraph. As Jackie Huba has pointed out, social media monitoring needs to go on 24/7. If an issue, story or event surrounding your brand breaks over the weekend, what if your intern was hitting the slopes? And is that intern trained in crisis communication? Social media doesn't happen without a level of strategy behind it. And as Domino's learned during the recent kerfuffle, waiting even 48 hours to respond via social media channels is the surest way to make sure that the unflattering YouTube video you didn't want anyone to see gets a million hits.

Still, social media monitoring isn't all that tough. You can invest in the fancier tools, like Radian6 or CustomScoop, or you can follow the do-it-yourself method:

1. Set up a Google alert for your company name, field and area of interest. For example, for my client Spoken Communications, (they enable phone self-service to work--shameless plug!) I've set up a Google alert for "customer service," "customer experience," "call center," and "ivr." The first two, I've noticed, give more general, soft-skills articles, while the latter two tend to turn up results more focused on industry news.
2. Set up Twitter searches for your company name, field and areas of interest. In my fave desktop app, Seesmic desktop, searches are automatically saved in the left-hand sidebar, so you can access searches for "customer service" and "ivr" topics and articles there as well. This is also great for reTweeting fodder, if you're the considerate social media type. :-) 
3. Likewise, set up Twitter hashtag searches. Most desktop apps have the option of searching via hashtag and saving the searches, and also, my favorite iPhone app, Tweetie, the "More" option takes you to a screen with a Search option, where you can do a general search (as in #2) or a hashtag search. For example, if you're interested in Tweets being tagged with #journalism, #newsroom or #futureofnews, hit the star button to save the search, which will then show up under Saved Searches. See? Easy!
4. Listen first. After setting up searches, take a few weeks to monitor and evaluate the types of mentions your company and search terms turn up. Is it chatter about your company, or is your company name mostly absent? Is the chatter positive, negative or neutral? What about your competition? Which topics are trending in your field?
5. Participate. Decide on a standard response. Comcast has a great one: "Can I help?" to any mention of "Comcast," positive or negative, on Twitter. What will yours be?