The Power of Monitoring Strikes Again
September 16, 2009 by Chuck
4Every once in a while you have one of those “WOW!” moments and feel like you need to share it with as many people as you can find. Today, one of those kinds of events happened to me.
I’ve talked a little bit here, and on my other blog, Alternate Perspectives, about how important listening in the social media space can be. Not only is it a way to gather valuable intelligence on your p0tential community (if you are using social media channels externally, particularly), but it is also a valuable tool to avert crises that can flare up to ridiculous proportions because of the fluidty of content on social networks.
On Wednesday morning, I was followed by an account named @CableStinks. Now, if you are active in social networking, particularly Twitter, you’ll know that there is a heavy spam component (especially recently) that you must wade through to get to the good stuff. This account struck me as odd though. They were using the Dish Network logo, and some of its marketing copy in its bio and tweets. Normally I’d just dismiss this as idle spam, but I tweeted about it shortly after I received the follow request asking if Dish Network was aware of this account clearly ripping off their logo.
Well, apparently I raised a flag over at Dish Network’s compliance office. I received an e-mail from someone at Dish Network, and then spoke briefly with one of their compliance officers about the account. Unfortunately, I had no additional information to provide them above the fact that I was followed by this obviously fake account.
It seems pretty clear that Dish Network is monitoring social media conversations. How else would they have found me? I wanted to take the time to offer a kudos to Dish Network for monitoring online conversations and trying to put an end to this spam account. But I also wanted to offer up a cautionary tale: Don’t monitor and you might be the victim of someone misrepresenting your brand on social networks!
Which reminds me of your great social media comment on ROI - the Risk Of Ignoring what ‘s being said about your company, and reinforces the relevant recommendations to monitor.