New best practices paper on social media monitoring, engagement, measurement

We’ve just release a new study on emerging best practices in social media monitoring, engagement and measurement based on interviews with large corporations like Cisco, Intuit, GE and with the top monitoring technology providers (Visible Technologies, Radian6, Cymfony, Market Sentinel), who have fascinating stories based on existing clients and from the RFP/sales process.

(Economy be damned, one technology provider even had to fire a big brand company because its agency was basically spamming bloggers and Tweeters.)

The report includes sections on:

• Guidelines for responding, engaging, working with legal, staffing
• Measurement
• Biggest surprises
• Most common mistakes
• Advice
• Next steps

What I found especially interesting:

• Universal agreement that people in companies should be engaging in social media conversations– NOT outside agencies.
• Creating monitoring systems is straightforward; developing engagement strategies is much more complex, requiring a lot of employee education and process redesign (ex: customer service)
• The stronger the corporate culture of trust and employee empowerment, the easier it is to implement and scale enterprise-wide monitoring and engagement approaches.
• Insights from social media monitoring are extremely valuable, but creating the right reports to glean that value for different functions is challenging.
• For most companies legal has not been an obstacle. But collaborating with legal is essential. (See tips on dealing with legal in the report.)
• How few conversations require or could benefit from a response. Many companies think the cost would be exorbitant to assign people to respond to Tweets, blogs and forums, but once they analyze the data and do a business case analysis the investment for the value provides a good return on investment, whether it’s for customer service, sales, or reputation management.

To get a free copy of the report, click here.

Would love to hear  your thoughts about these best practices based on your experience. What’s missing?