Baseline Monitoring and Reporting Requirements

HR, IT, and Legal should agree on a baseline set of monitoring requirements. This list of requirements includes:

Defining the necessity and scope of monitoring of social media usage by Community Managers and employees

Understanding and updating security threats to social media platforms used by the company and monitoring employee activity on affected platforms

Monitoring reaction and change in behavior based on training

Monitoring sites that mention the company most often

Tracking tools used to monitor employees on social media

Monitoring activity of other organizations in your industry

Monitoring and reporting on what online communities are saying about your company

Tracking the influencers in your industry and those specific to your brand

To set the baseline requirements, all departments that have a stake in social media have to be brought in to determine monitoring and reporting needs. The Community Manager, who is essential to coordinating and monitoring activities, can be the lead in collecting the necessary requirements for monitoring. You need to understand what each department does in the social media sphere and what their concerns are regarding how social media impacts their business processes. What tools are they using that require assistance from the IT department to manage and monitor? In Chapter 15, we will cover some operational tools in detail.

How are you monitoring actual usage, authorized usage, and productivity loss versus productivity improvements? How can HR work with Marketing to follow a specific strategy? The Community Manager can coordinate training programs over time for social media usage, and gain an understanding of the staff’s digital capabilities. Define specific monitoring and reporting goals such as determining who is using social media, if policy restrictions are being broken, and how to identify and avert risk scenarios.

Monitoring internal usage of social media can be easy. Because all the data is on your network, you can monitor and track all data communications. Using standard intrusion detection systems for monitoring is already part of many IT department tool sets. Examples of internal usage for social networks are wikis, SharePoint boards, intranets, Twitter backchannels, informal employee Facebook groups, and so on.

We have discussed a number of tools such as SocialMention.com to monitor external mentions of your company name. Internally, you might have a forum where employees discuss the company. You can use a tool such as SocialCast.com for internal social networking management. Figure 12-4 shows an example of using SocialCast to manage an internal social network. Since you have complete control of your internal networks and any software installed on your servers, tracking usage is easy. Whatever tools you use internally, you should have the capability to allow IT security and Human Resources to monitor and report on what is being said.

Figure 12-4 Using SocialCast for monitoring an internal social network