Forrester Research reiterated the importance of being aware of what people say about your brand online, and noted the four key parts to successfully evaluating potential brand monitoring solutions.

While a smaller firm with some time to invest can make a decent go at brand monitoring through the use of Google's Blog Search, Alerts, and Trends tools, bigger firms need bigger solutions. Your company may be big enough and busy enough where a dedicated solution will be necessary.



If you want to take that step, you should consider the points raised by Forrester. Their report by Peter Kim on Brand Monitoring discussed several major names in that industry, and drilled down to a quartet of considerations for businesspeople for such services.



Data collection comes first. Sources for commentary could be mainstream media outposts, or chatter from bloggers and posters on message boards. A vendor that can handle more data can find much more information for a customer, but that capacity will probably come at a higher cost.



Once they have the data, the brand monitor has to process that information. Kim wrote that the more sophisticated operations will employ methods like Bayesian filtering and natural language processing to accomplish text analysis.



Since not all data has been created with equal relevance to everyone's analytical needs, a brand monitor may only need to assess a particular subset of data. For example, Fender and Cabela's may both want to know about discussions on "bass." Fender probably doesn't need to have chatter about bass fishing in its reports, while Cabela's won't have demand for bass guitar discussions.



Once a company has a brand monitor working for it, the business needs to receive the insights the monitor can provide. Kim wrote how these can be as simple as delivering alerts with email or RSS feeds. Or they could be integrated with applications like ones for customer relationship management.



Problems can come with the influx of information. While having extra intelligence like this can benefit a company, that firm needs to dedicate some resources to implement measures as recommended by the brand monitor. Those have to be put in place rapidly, since news on the Internet can travel very quickly.



I asked Kim what mistake businesspeople might make after receiving insights from the brand monitor. "The most common pitfall I hear about is relying too much on any one data source," he said. "The information collected from a brand monitoring solution still needs to be validated and compared with other types of data, e.g. sales information, competitive media spend, etc."





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Tag: Brand Monitoring



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