Competitive Analysis

How can you find out what your competitors are saying about you? The comprehensive audit process developed throughout this book will address the accounts, platforms, and resources allocated companywide to your social media initiatives. Before joining the conversation online, however, monitoring what consumers, competitors, regulators, and potential leads are saying is vitally important. Your organization already has technologies in place (hopefully!) to track attacks and log activities of the bad guys. Now, you need similar capabilities and tools for monitoring and measuring the social media space.

By tracking your reputation and online sentiment, you are in a better position to shape your brand equity actively in the social media space, identify potential “disgruntled” consumers and groups, evaluate their potential for challenging your online initiatives, and proactively counter those challenges quickly and effectively. A number of online utilities are available for this purpose, including Google Alerts, Social Mention, Radian6, and Reputation.com, to name but a very few. At the most basic level, you can use Google Alerts, as shown in Figure 1-1, to see when your company name or an executive of your company is mentioned (we used Gary’s name here as an example). You can also use the same process to assess what is being said about your competitors. You should probably also know what customers are saying about your competition to help inform your decisions and to help you react more quickly to changes the competition may be implementing.

Figure 1-1 Using Google Alerts to track any mentions of a name

We will guide you through using several relevant tools as practical sources for monitoring and securing the constantly changing social space around your organization. (One important caveat is that these companies are relatively new, so we don’t know whether they’ll be here a year from now.) The players may change, but the demand for monitoring your online reputation is here to stay. As such, we are constantly monitoring and reviewing new solutions as they arrive on the market and have developed the resource section of our website (www.securingsocialmedia.com/resources) as a guide to these and many other invaluable tools that you will need to develop a successful social media security strategy.