Social Media Monitoring Software: The PR Pro’s Radar

Threats are incoming. Deploy chaff and all social media monitoring resources in my position! 

Radar is an amazing technology that bounces electromagnetic waves off of incoming clouds, planes, and even missiles. Social media monitoring is a powerful process that can warn a brand of incoming danger. It isn’t just about using social media monitoring to benchmark or evaluate a brand’s performance; it is about understanding the changing nature of how a brand’s reputation is changing in real time.

Why Social Media Is the New Crisis Frontline

According to Hootsuite, 27% of social marketers adjust their brands to fit social-cultural moments like memes and trends. In most cases, picking up on a trend and playing within it isn’t a risky proposition, but when brand values or perceived brand values conflict with that meme, disaster can strike. Tracking social sentiment analytics related to brands and diving deep into audience demographics can be a valuable trigger to stop a social campaign from going live.

Think back to the Bud Light firestorm, or Kraft Heinz’s Smile ad, which rubbed consumers the wrong way. Backlash happens quickly, and Jaguar learned all it needed to about that in its most recent rebrand, which befuddled car lovers and sent the luxury car brand shopping for a new agency of record. When values, imagery, and messages don’t align, a brand is in trouble.

If your audience demographics are XYZ, and that population has specific dislikes, and gets hot and bothered on specific issues pressing on those for reach isn’t wise.

Turning Social Noise into Actionable Signals

Measuring on social helps highlight when competitors have hit an audience landmine. Whether that blowback generates a spillover on your brand depends on what actions you take or don’t take. Do you comment on the issue? Does your audience even care? Are you facing the same conditions as your competitor brand, or is your organization squeaky clean?

Using natural language processing to evaluate sentiment is a good starting point, but it isn’t detailed enough to provide useful intelligence. Automated topic monitoring, though, helps highlight issues more clearly. 

Consider what is negative in the context of your brand and measure it. If you are in the pharmaceutical industry, anti-vaccine and anti-science perspectives are an important cultural trend to track; they aren’t good. They are so clearly negative that you can build an audience persona around them, track them over time, and evaluate incident rates of things like Measles. 

Consider what that watch-out topic is for your industry. Rising sentiments on those topics are a warning sign that people, advocacy groups, and even government actors are mobilizing against your industry or brand. This is the “incoming bogey” signal that radar provides to defenders.

Measuring your brand in the context of those watch-outs helps determine brand health. This isn’t just competitive share of voice monitoring; it focuses on issue prevalence, and past research by Fullintel has shown that brands that face more issues recover more poorly from crises.

Measuring What Matters

Today’s issue landscape is different from that of 2014, 2018, or even 2022. Brands are not off limits for interest groups and organizers. Compared to governments or ideas, brands are easy to attack; they are an appetizer. 

Getting executives on board for aggressive social media campaigns is hard; some retail and consumer brands like Lush are even abandoning their social feeds. Measuring risks is a great place to start, if for nothing else than awareness of what issues are affecting your competitors. 

Tracking performance and driving to understand campaign ROI is crucial, which makes measurement an essential part of any campaign. By understanding what’s impacting your core audiences, being true to the brand values that brought that audience to you in the first place is the only path forward.

If you don’t know your audience and haven’t considered what motivates and enrages them, then you need radar, and you need it now.