Nice post by Richard Stacy whose knack for social media metaphors has embellished many a powerpoint presentation.
In his own words [social media monitoring] “is a bit like astronomy in that the key to success is looking at the right parts of the sky. For much of the time, there may be nothing happening in that space – but this in itself is important information. And when information does enter it – it can come from anywhere – an ‘influential blog’ or a random tweet. Both may be equally important. Places only become relevant when they enter your spaces – which is why the space is the place, as it were”.
This is largely counter-intuitive to most speeches (pitches?) about online monitoring (along the lines of “what you don’t know can kill you” [insert kryptonite/Dell Hell/Motrin case study here], yet very commonsensical to most seasoned bloggers and monitoring experts.
Good monitoring starts with defining your online brand territory and mapping the universe of sites and feeds that are actually relevant to your brand. Sure, something may always appear out of left field, but 9.9 times out of ten, it won’t gain any traction unless it is picked up by one or several sites in your universe of reference, which will act as critical Connectors to pass it up the food chain. That sample of the Net is indeed a net through which you can catch or discard relevant information. The network is the radar: know the network and you’ll spend less time stargazing.
