Social Listening

As I have previously mentioned, it's important to get content out onto social media. It is also important to monitor social media and listen to what people are saying. By listening to social media, you can find out what people are saying about a brand, gauge the health of a brand online, analyze and track a brand, and identify conversations of crisis about a brand.

The types of media concerned with social media monitoring and listening is

• Owned media includes social media pages that your company controls, like Facebook, Twitter, a blog, or company website.
• Earned media is media that comes from people starting conversations, it's everything else that is not company owned and operated.    

Tools that can be used to monitor social media include Omniture, Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, Radian 6,

Perhaps the most important reason to monitor social media is to catch a crisis early. Thanks to the internet and social media, a crisis can escalate out of control in just a matter of a few hours.

Ignoring social media, especially during a PR crisis can lead to large losses for a company. In 2013, Target loss favor of many customers because it did not act very quickly when their data on customers was breached.

Even two years later, in 2015, target still has a very extensive FAQs page about the breach on their corporate website.

PR Crisis are going to happen, but companies can reduce their effects by monitoring social media. The time to respond to a crisis is reduced, but customers also have acess to a company though the internet. The best way to combat a PR crisis is to admit to the mistake, formulate a plan, and then tell consumers what you plan to do.