Corporate Social Media Mointoring-- Chapter Two from Dave Churbuck

Over at Churbuck.com is an excellent post here on monitoring blogs and how this process need not be based on paid applications that generate maps or Marshal McLuhan like colored Media Hot or Media Cold colored displays. Dave’s riff is suitable classroom material and goes well beyond the intro to corporate social media drek I’ve seen on the web for the last several years.

A statement Dave posted last night grabbed me: ”Sentiment metrics are particularly vexing, volume sentiments are crap. Be wary of tools that purport to deliver metrics. I subscribe to the manual scoring method of sentiment. If it really matters then the only viable way to tell whether a post is positive or negative is to read it and make the call. Doing so will entail enlisting the support of a team of monitors or moderators, or, if you are a sole operator, doing it yourself.

I suspect that very few corporations have “teams” assigned to monitoring blogs or, more importantly, have the bandwidth and authority to take action on problems as they appear in blogs.

In the end when it comes to Social Media and corporations the winners will have teams or one inspired individual that can drive solutions to problems or troublesome perceptions as they appear.

Reading Churbuck’s riff on advanced social media makes me wish I weren’t retired.  Well almost.—Jim Forbes 04/22.2008

{Mandatory Disclosure: Dave Churbuck and I were coworkers in the last century at PCWeek and are  friends.}