So You’ve Created a Fancy New Listening Platform…Now What?

There’s been so much written about social media monitoring (or listening if you prefer) that you’d think we were all becoming “experts” at how to not only monitor, but setup the platform as well. If that were true I, along with several other vendors, would be out of business by now. The reality is that setting up listening platforms are hard work. Whether you’re trying to piece it together with services like Google Blog Search, TweetBeep and other free resources, or you’re using a paid service like Radian6, developing the platform so that it gathers data important to you is time consuming.

I had a conversation late last week with Geoff Knox, formerly of Dell, about the development and maintenance of listening platforms. What I don’t think people take into account is the amount of time it takes to develop the platform, but then also make sure it continues being relevant to your company. So now that you’ve decided whether or not you are going to use free or paid tools, how do you ensure that the information you’re getting is stays important over time?

1. Are you tracking the correct sources? This is specifically applicable to those of you using free tools, but you don’t want to be monitoring Twitter, for example, if you’re conversations have moved on to blogs, or forums or some other social networking site. If you’re noticing a dip in conversations on a particular social network, does that mean you might need reevaluate what sources you’re tracking? It might…

2. Are the peers still relevant? Paid services allow you to track your conversations versus those of your peers. Do the peers you are tracking still make sense? Are there others you think would present a more apples-to-apples comparison? Do you even need to continue monitoring peers (you do)?

3. Continue evaluating your sentiment rubric How you categorize articles as positive, negative or neutral (or even a more complex scale) can change over time. You may not think so, but over time your senses are dulled after reading similar conversations over-and-over again. Think about how you’re scoring articles now, and in the past. Is it the same? Are you missing stories that could be either positive or negative because you’ve become desensitized to the conversations? Consider using someone else on your team to score articles and compare notes to make sure you’re getting an accurate read.

What else? Those of you with experience in building these platforms, what else should you consider to make sure your listening platform stays relevant?

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