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 Many come to SM with great trepidation, but they should realize the SM opportunity is a way to access, engage and encourage the people who love your products. SM monitoring – or buzz monitoring – gives brands visibility on negative customer sentiment and an opportunity to respond and reverse that sentiment before it gets out of hand. Brands should identify customers who are highly social and are brand advocates, then measure and share the activities and conversations they are engaging in on the brand's behalf. The good news is today’s panel seemed to agree that most people who write or blog tend to write positive comments, and the history of SM will be about how everyday people took over marketing and sold the products they liked to each other. Having said that, there were some great lessons on defusing negative sentiment shared by Pay As You Drive insurance company in this afternoon’s session on Social Media case studies.

Payasyoudrive’s CEO blogs regularly, and responded directly to an upset customer who complained on an SM site. The customer was so pleased by the response that he became a brand advocate! So, you can see that while there may be outliers who will abuse SM, they are the exception, not the norm. Most people are reasonable and by engaging them – and addressing legitimate issues – you can guide customer sentiment in a positive direction. In terms of metrics, by way of comparison, the panel advised that you can look at the cost of any ad campaign (online, offline), and compare that cost to the benefits you get through SM. Of course, one must first identify what one is trying to achieve with SM. Branding clients tend to have more difficult objectives than direct response clients.

The panel suggested that brands can consider using panel metrics and social media metrics in combination. In either scenario, clients should have strong internal understanding of what the SM service is worth to them based on what they are trying to achieve. Brands are looking at the major SM platforms and wondering how they can leverage them beyond insight research, for example even in terms of buying advertising on them. But the fact is most brands are moving onto Face book and other SNS and establishing a presence to encourage people who like them to become their fans. They are using SNS to drive engagement and interaction. The point was underscored by the panel that an ad buy is a media buy, and that can be done on any media. Potential SNS community backlash to advertising should be carefully considered. After all, the main reason people are on SNS is to make friends and maintain friendships - not to buy stuff from advertisers.

Also, many SM activities are not highly linked, so for metrics, brands can look at the volume of search keywords that you have talked about on your SM campaign. SM should not be seen as direct response in nature, but you can measure sentiment, and key word volume, as well as referring URLs. My take away from this and several of the panels at Ad Tech is that while SM metrics are still a work in progress – and really do need to be tailored to the particular needs and circumstances of any given client – the opportunity to listen to customers and engage and motivate them as brand advocates in the SM space is one that marketers cannot afford to miss.