Great piece in Mashable yesterday concerning the importance of “monitoring and measuring” your brand with respect to its social media presence. Author Maria Ogneva notes that there are a host of tools up to the task, but makes the important distinction that each of them can vary substantially in how it gets the job done (e.g. approach, methodology, metrics, depth of analysis, channels measured, reports and UI).
As Ogneva explains: “In your search for the right tool(s), you should be looking to both monitor and measure your brand on social media. The two terms are used somewhat interchangeably, and although there is some overlap and similarity in business goals, monitoring and measurement are distinct processes.”
She also makes expert distinctions between the definition of monitoring and measuring. “Monitoring,” she notes, ‘is the process of continuous and immediate discovery of conversations with the purpose of learning, engaging, helping and collaborating . . . measurement is more concerned with metrics over a specified time period. Whereas monitoring answers the question ‘Who is talking about [insert keyword] right now and what are they saying?’ measurement answers questions of ‘How did my keywords perform over time?’, ‘How does that compare to my competitors?’ and ‘What are some trends I can glean to make my product more usable by these people who are giving me feedback?’”