The current trends in Social Media Brand Monitoring focus around your PR/Marketing agency. They provide tools to create nice reports telling you what the public perception of your brand is - and perhaps some alerts when something “bad” happens.

Led by Radian6 - this trend is very powerful and shouldn’t be ignored. But the real questions facing you (COO, CEO, VP of Product) are:

1. Is there any real advantage to cleaning up after the perception is already created?


2. If so - how the heck to we operationalize that?

The first question goes to the advantage of quickly (in near real time) engaging, participating and correcting the issues that cause a negative brand perception. As I’ve said before - the urgency is preventing the perception (and attendant backlash) from becoming the story. The real danger is having the original negative perception create a story - the story about how the Social Media universe erupted in outrage. That story will repeat and re-enforce the initial negative perception and create another, more subtle and destructive one - that you are not liste