By Rebecca Canan

Did you have a chance to attend our webinar last week on social media monitoring?  During the webinar, we invited CEC members to join a discussion with Scott Stevener from Monsanto, Linda Locke from Reputare Consulting (formerly SVP at MasterCard), and Karin Kane from evolve24.  You may have recently seen guest blog posts from Scott and Linda on the CEC Insider.  Below, get the quick scoop from our third panelist, Karin, who manages client engagements at evolve24, a reputation management and monitoring firm.  And CEC Members: if you missed the webinar, you can access the replay here!

Rebecca (CEC): In brief, can you describe how your media monitoring is different from what most communicators use/receive?

Karin: We recognize that communicators can provide tremendous value across an organization when they measure, and share, the insights they can uncover from media.  Because of that, we focus on providing those insights.  We offer the widest selection of social media content, and provide very advanced analytics that allow our clients to measure social media in very distinct ways.  Along with the standard share of voice and sentiment metrics, we measure influence, credibility, reputation, emotion, and risk. These measurements make media monitoring relevant for communications and marketing teams, customer experience and customer service teams, HR, sales, operations and risk management.

Rebecca: We hear from CEC members that they use media monitoring for  either (1) reactive purposes – to alert them to immediate  reputation risks OR (2) retrospective purposes – to track tonality and key message penetration.  What are some new or different applications of this data that you’ve seen companies use?

Karin: Our clients are using social media in a number of very innovative ways:

• Product development teams have found that social media can be a valuable, and less costly, alternative to traditional market research. It provides an open, unbiased environment for people to share their wants and needs, and provides great insights for product features and when it’s measured properly.
• Strategic planners are finding that social media can help uncover “unknown unknowns”, or risks and opportunities that they might not otherwise be aware of.  They’re gaining early warning of these opportunities, getting real time insight in the market environment, and using that for business planning.
• We are also seeing Customer Satisfaction teams using social media in new ways.  They’re looking at how consumers interact with a product, reaching out to customers directly, and getting a much better picture of what customers are looking for.

Rebecca: Can you tell us one fun fact about yourself and/or background?

Karin: I’ve recently become addicted to Foursquare, the social media location tracking program! I was the mayor of Chicago O’Hare Airport’s Terminal Three for one brief, glorious week.