Christopher Corbett wrote a fascinating book entitled Orphans Preferred (The Twisted Truth and Lasting Legend of the Pony Express). It tells of the story that became lore of the west, heralding the then seemingly insurmountable task of delivering news in "nine days from San Francisco to New York." It is astounding to think that similar messages to what was carried across the continent on those daring treks are now broadcast to the world ... within seconds. I recently sat by an executive at a conference and asked (customarily) who she was with and what she did, she replied, "YUM! Brands, Public Relations". Ouch. Our conversation took place within 48 hours of the now infamous rat fiasco. Everyone in Public Relations knows ... news travels fast.
The speed of communication today, eclipsing the days of the Express enough to spread rat-news at lightning speed, is why brand-monitoring as a service will keep getting big. Fortune magazine (March 19th, 2007) highlights BuzzLogic in it's article "The Buzz Around Buzz"; it points out that the brand-monitoring business is growing by 70% each year, a clear indicator of supply meeting demand. Though the big brands have garnered more of the monitoring, even those of us with "smaller brands" cannot afford to avoid the social media revolution and learn from those in the spotlight, e.g. Jet Blue. A marketing colleague with a local small business commented to me about their concern to monitor the discussion across a variety of online networks about their brand. The concern was valid: how do we not only monitor the discussion, but facilitate or perpetuate (organically) healthy discussions about our brands? (For this, I'm learning myself and hope to arrive at a blogworthy solution, soon.)
When it comes to assessing what's being said about your company, refer to Forrester's report via Media Guerrilla. It's a great place to start shopping for your own brand-monitoring service. I dare say that those of us in smaller businesses might be on our own in terms of brand-monitoring, which is okay, since the web is replete with options. If you are not monitoring your own brand be sure and subscribe every variation of your business name to every RSS Reader, Google Blog Search, News Alert Service, and Talk Digger type solution possible. The web has brought such a paradigm shift to listening to our market that we'll only have ourselves to blame for not having our ear to ground. Though our stories and issues might not be front page news on every major media network, they could be major news piped-in immediately to the desktops of major decision makers that affect our businesses, daily, within a matter of seconds.
