Tag: social media monitoring

You can glean a lot of valuable data from mechanically analyzing the social stream. You can listen in, engage and counterpunch with a comment or a tweet. If you’re aggressive and swift, you may even shift sentiment a degree or two. However, monitoring has so little value as anything but a starting point for a reactive marketing strategy, we have to ask why tools that do it seem to be the only ones that exist. Why is monitoring and reflexively reacting the priority?

B2C brands are discovering the remarkable reach of social promotions. Pepsi has reported that every entry in its Refresh Project generates, on average, 5,000 votes. That means the 5,000 projects Pepsi had approved and posted to its Refresh site by June 2010 generated 25 million direct engagements. And those 25 million represent only the tip of the iceberg relative to the total media reach generated by the 5,000 posters who promoted their causes through their own social networks. Social promotions, defined here as any intentional social engagement – queries, polls, contests and other structured invitations to interact with a brand – seed the social landscape, trigger interaction and inspire sharing. Their success is changing how brands look at social media – reducing fears and opening minds.