Social Media Audits are critical for business planning

Why Social Media Audits are critical for business planning 
 

StuWiley

In addition to constant listening and alerting to their market, brands should conduct an initial, then quarterly review and annual social media audit to be successful.

Just as companies conduct audits of inventory, employees, and budgets on an often annual basis, they should also survey the landscape to find out what customers, influencers, partners and employees are participating on the social web. Audits are critical for identifying risks and opportunities, priorities, benchmarking and measurement of previous efforts, and planning for future roadmaps; the same applies for social media.

Three Types of Social Media Audits

1. Initial Kickoff Audit. Brands should audit their social sphere as part of their initial planning process. Brands should work with a partner to find out the conversation index, top competitors, top discussed phrases, and customer experiences with products and services.

2. Conduct Quarterly Reviews, and Annual Audits: Social media teams should work with management and marketing managers to understand how and why the social web responded to activities in the market. Benchmark top advocates and detractors, and determine which topics or products are most talked about. Most importantly, benchmark your own social efforts, measuring the change and analyze what caused them, you’ll need this data as your budgets are questioned. Finally, use this knowledge to set quantitative and qualitative goals of where you want to be next year.

3. Conduct Ongoing Monitoring: Brands should be constantly monitoring their brand mentions and social media discussion of relevant topics using alerts and reports. Ongoing monitoring is critical for crisis response management, and as part of your planning you should have policies, trigger events and response processes in place prior to an event. For more on how social media impacts all facets of your business contact us about our webinar for CEO’s.  Ongoing monitoring also is imperative for trend spotting and contextual analysis of macro changes. 

4. Get wide participation, use partners and stakeholders.  Use your initial competitive intelligence to identify the optimal keywords, phrases, tones and locations to measure, and involve a variety of stakeholders, both internal and external. By creating a regular iteration for review and discussion, all parties can be participants in shaping a common objective and formulating next steps. While this may smell of “management by committee”, this is meant to be a core collaboration phase leading to a definitive prioritization, used to identify issues or non issues, and to qualify and quantify potential impacts.  By establishing a lead who is accountable for this process, you will establish a process and go-to mechanism for eliciting relevant information, as well as an efficient decision process for roadmap planning.  Regularly distribute findings to stakeholders, and invite input on potential meanings and solutions.  Better to have a process for ongoing roadmapping, than to be caught unaware. 

5. Consider a monitoring vendor as a long term partner. Find a listening platform or set of tools that meets your business needs.  Hire a seasoned technology and social media consultant that understands your business, and gets the social web –beyond just mainstream media. There are numerous platforms available, some that meet claims and others that do not.  A good social media consultant should be able to steer you to the best platform for your needs, objectively clarifying and addressing the problem you are trying to solve rather than attempting to sell a tool. At no time should you rely simply on the software vendors sales pitch.  Validate all claims.

6. Appropriately Staff and Fund. Don’t expect this partner to understand the nuances of your markets’ discussion, assign a few part time resources internally to champion this audit internally –and don’t forget to budget. Social Media implementations are proportional, representing a sliding scale of potential tactics based on priorities and budgets.

7. Don’t be afraid to experiment.  Be open minded.  You may be in a unique business or industry that has not yet come to grips with the power of social media. Do your homework, gather competitive intelligence before initiating any tactical or strategic action.  Then try new approaches that may seem a bit out of the box.  Monitor effectiveness and be ready to make adjustments. Social media is a new frontier, those afraid of a little trailblazing will be destined for the Darwin heap.  Be smart – crawl walk run, but do so with purpose.  As with anything, you may take a few knocks, but you will take many more if you aren’t assertive and let others dictate. 

8. Listen to your target and their environment.  You will be aware of changes, influences, and variable factors that can be quickly integrated into your practices.  A non-listener will always be in a reactive mode, so make sure that you have your ears on and participate. When the party moves, you’ll know right where to be.  When you see a convergence happening, you’ll be well positioned for “opportunistic” responses rather than defensive moves. 

9. Understand that the math has changed.  Industrial age ROI measurements are largely linear in nature. Social Media in the Information Age is geometric, so multi dimensional measurements and formulas must be applied.   If your current staff is ill equipped to make this change, retire them and find relevant expertise.  Likewise, if you have an agency or any other third party relationship that claims a lock on new frontier formulas, you should put them through as critical an audit as possible, and discard heavily.  There are far too many agencies and department heads claiming results (using old math), yet fail to deliver when geometric auditing is applied.  Know the allocation options, and where social media spends drive cost efficiency.  

10. Seek professional help.  No, not that kind. You want consultants or staff who are highly aware and successful in the rapidly moving environment of social media.  Advisors who have continually proven that they know how to stay on top of changes, and exploit this fragmented marketplace.   Preferably individuals who have worked with a variety of businesses, and understand that Social Media touches all aspects of your company.  If you find someone who only speaks in terms of brand, marketing, PR or sales – or Twitter, Facebook, MySpace marketing allocations – RUN AWAY.  The very best teams are those who grew up developing the underlying technologies, can speak the language, and who also have backgrounds in multiple corporate disciplines.