The social web has created many opportunities for brands to engage with their consumers online. People are talking about products and companies on blogs, social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook and MySpace, forums and message boards, and also on wikis. Listening to online conversation around your brand and competitors is very important. This document will outline the five steps for getting started.

1. Five Steps for Getting Started
with Social Media Monitoring
Learn more about Alterian SM2 Social Media
Monitoring at www.alterian.com/sm2

2. Introduction
The social web has created many opportunities for brands
to engage with their consumers online. People are talking
about products and companies on blogs, social networking
sites such as Twitter, Facebook and MySpace, forums and
message boards, and also on wikis.
Listening to online conversation around your brand and
competitors is very important.
This document will outline the five steps for getting started.

3. Step 1: Identify Your Needs - What tools(s) are needed to
accomplish your objectives and goals?.
The first step is to identify your goals for monitoring online conversations.
Initially it's important to get a baseline of what people are saying online about
your company and product. Once this is set up you should also listen to
conversations around your competitors and industry topics. There are many
free tools that can be used to gather conversations. This is limiting because they
generally only monitor one source such as blogs or Twitter. So a number of tools
are required but it is difficult to aggregate, analyze and report on the information.
There are also many tools at various price points and the services that are
offered vary greatly. When trialing these products there are a number of things
to consider:
• number of channels that information is being gathered from
• ability to sort and analyze the data
• scalability of the tool (as your brand grows and you broaden the scope of
your search)
• real time alerts
• options for reporting (high level down to actionable results)
• workflow

4. Step 2: Setting-up the Searches
This is the most challenging part of social media monitoring. Identifying keywords
can be tricky. In an ideal world your company name and brand are unique, but that
generally is not the case. So using "and" can greatly help to focus your search. It
is also very helpful if the brand is well known. For example if your company name
is “Method” it would be important to set up searches that include specific products.
For example: “Method” and “aroma pill”.
Exclude words that are not related to your search. For example you would want to
exclude 'planet' when doing a keyword search for 'Saturn'.
Stop words are another challenge when setting up searches. Words such as "a",
"an", "the", "us", etc and numbers are not generally indexed. Searches ignore
these words because they are not indexed. So it is important to use phrases when
these words are involved.
Boolean searches are generally offered for creating advanced keyword searches.
These can be used with parentheses in an infinite number of ways to create
complex searches. Here are the most common options: 'or', 'and not', wildcard put
at the end of a word *(bath* = bath, bathroom, bathing, bathtub, etc)

5. Step 3: Refine the Search – Reduce, Noise and Spam
After the search results are returned they need to be reviewed. It is important to
optimize the searches so that the tool efficiently gathers only the conversations
that you are interested in. The goal is to identify unrelated results and spam. This
will also help you to focus your keyword searches to target.
The strategy for reducing unwanted results will depend on the number of search
results. If it's a few hundred then they can be scanned fairly quickly. Some quicker
ways to do it when working with larger amounts of data is to use the tag cloud and
look at results that are totally unrelated to your needs. Delete them and note the
terms so that you can exclude it in your keyword searches.
Spam primarily originates from specific URL addresses. The quickest way to
identify that is reviewing the domains and counts specific to each. Spam really
varies depending on the industry topic. It's best to ignore the URLs at the top level
domain. In some cases you also may not be interested in information from certain
sources such as wikis. Those can also be ignored.

6. Step 4: Review Results, Identify Trends and Subcategorize the Results
include spam and unrelated information then you are able to start analyzing them.
The tool should provide you with ways to view the conversations in a number of
ways. It should provide you with the information to accomplish your goals at both a
high level down to granular reports that are actionable.
As you are reviewing the information you may see trends that cause you to want
to subdivide the conversations for further analysis. Maybe you would like to see a
list of the influencers from the a particular region or city because your product is
very popular there? Or maybe a new term has been coined and you need to look
at the search results related to only that term to see how main stream it has
become. Or maybe you have identified a new use of your product and would like
to take a look at the conversations for a potential new market?

7. Step 5: Reporting and Responding
The tool should provide reports that offer something for all business levels. It's important to
be able to create high level reports for management and the executive level. There needs to
be a broad range of reporting options so that the conversations can be analyzed and trends
considered. Finally there should be reports that the user receives on a regular basis. These
reports should be actionable. It's also important to have real time alerts for brand building
and crisis management situations.
Once you get the tool set up, then you can create a workflow that will enable you and your
staff to utilize the information on a regular basis. After listening and analyzing the
conversations for a period of time you will be able to:
• Create a strategy for engaging with those talking about your brand
• Benchmark the online conversations and establish metrics for measuring your
engagement
Social media monitoring is becoming just as insightful and imperative as web analytics are.
As with any endeavor it is important to use the right tool to accomplish your work in an
effective and efficient manner. Start listening to the conversations happening over social
media using an Alterian SM2 Freemium account (http://sm2.techrigy.com). SM2 gives you
complete monitoring and analysis of social media for an unlimited period of time.

8. Five Steps for Getting Started
with Social Media Monitoring
For further information about about Alterian SM2 Social
Media Monitoring at www.alterian.com/sm2
Follow us on Twitter #Alterian