More
and more in today’s society, social media is being used by businesses. A
startup creates its very own facebook page. A company’s mascot has its
own twitter account. etc. The typical purpose of any company to cross
into the realm of social media is for promoting themselves, but this has
the side effect of establishing a platform for end users to connect and
share ideas.
This
side effect is profound. It creates a way for end users to give
feedback, ask questions, and more. But this also means that the
company’s responsibilities have grown, and their quality of service now
encompases this new platform. For example, if we have company XYZ and
they create a facebook page for promoting themselves. All of a sudden,
there’s a thousand people posting comments on this page, some negative,
some positive, and many which require a response. If the company
refrains from monitoring this page, any end users who post may feel
ignored.
But how can any company keep track of an overwhelmingly vast populace of social media? How
is any company expected to know what millions of people accross dozens
of platforms might be saying about their product or service? Well,
there’s software for it. That’s right, specially designed software which
listens to social media- listens to what people are saying.
When
i first heard of this software, i got the feeling of “big brother is
watching”. It seems crazy and a little scary that there’s software out
there which is searching; reading messages across all of social media,
and it could include the messages I might have posted on my brother’s
social media page.
Marketing
Cloud is just one of these softwares, and it is used by companies to
listen in on what might be said about their product. Below I put a
little piece that I got off of their website
“Once
you start listening on the social web, you want to be assured you’re
not missing any important conversations. Marketing Cloud collects
real-time social data from over 400 million sources, adding
approximately five million new sources each week. Our historical archive
includes more than 55 billion posts, and dates back to May 2008.
Marketing
Cloud listens to conversations on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, forums,
blogs, mainstream news, LinkedIn, image sites, and we’re adding new
sources all the time.”
So
what is my stake in all this? It’s to inform you that nobody knows
exactly who is listening to social media. Software is out now, and it’s
evolving rapidly. As the tools for analysis become more deep, new ways
of listening to social media will be born, and it’s tough to judge what
ways we might be listening for trends on social media in the future.
sources:
- https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZY8Zhyphenhyphenl36sKnH7VKyKDfeduI2DXnXfB8rYCnkmTcOu9vGyttCYXghX28Q09Mb9eY07ZutSPb1PzDD_BUYT19HSyTHbKMtXHL1skH7UYUGa0Iq-gJCo9jlvGcp0K947ubNeOqTAddI/s1600/who+is+listening.jpg (image)
- http://www.salesforcemarketingcloud.com/