CHAPTER 14
Monetary Monitoring & Reporting

In today’s marketplace, there are a number of tools, both free and commercial, for monitoring social media. Google provides a number of powerful free tools for monitoring social media conversations, blog mentions, trending topics, and searches, providing you with real-time alerts and forecasting tools. Whether you are a small to medium-sized business (SMB) or a large corporation, there are a suite of tools and processes that you can implement to manage social media effectively and securely. According to the Altimeter 2010 140 Global Corporate Social Strategists survey (http://www.altimetergroup.com/how-corporations-should-prioritize-social-business-budgets), large companies spend, on average, $833,000 on social media. In theory, if you do not have that kind of budget in place, you won’t be able to develop a robust process. However, social media does not have to be expensive! The best way to maximize the benefit from your social media spending is to connect your Finance department to the Marketing and IT departments to monitor the value to spend ratio. A number of free resources are available that will let you develop a social media security strategy that meets your budget.

In this chapter, we discuss how to implement a social media security strategy on a budget that fits your organization. We’ll look at several of the free and paid tools available. For different types of organizations, processes will differ and the capabilities of the tools necessary will differ as well.

NOTE

Whether you’re an SMB or a global corporation, have a tiny budget or a budget in the hundreds of thousands, the Appendix lists many social media and social media security resources and you can also see our website—www.securingsocialmedia.com—for more tools.