For the final discussion board assignment for a marketing course I’m taking at UNCFSU, we were asked the following:
How do brands listen? Post third party vendors who have tools to enable social listening and describe how the tool works. Make sure your post is unique (not mentioned prior to you by your fellow students). Would you recommend that the company for which you are employeed, participate in social listening if they aren’t already? Why or why not?
One of the third party vendors who has tools to enable social listening is Zoho Social. It was featured on PC Magazine‘s list of “Best Social Media Management and Analytical Tools”. From the PC Magazine review: “Zoho Social is a full-featured, responsive hub for managing your social operations and tracking key metrics. It’s ideally suited for small to midsize businesses (SMBs) looking to curate and monitor a single brand across Google+, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Instagram.“
It seems to work very similarly to Hootsuite and other well known social listening tools, albeit with more breadth and crossover with business analysis tools. One feature of Zoho Social I found particularly interesting is the at-a-glance dashboard feature: “The dashboard is essentially a table showing key metrics—total audience, active audience, engagement, and the number of “stories” or posts created—each with a red or green plus/minus percentage next to them showing week-to-week change. It’s a brand’s social report card.” This is definitely a tool I’d be interesting in using for future work.
The company I am currently employed by (U.S. Army) does currently use tools for social listening, however it is exclusively used overseas, not in the U.S. (to the best of my knowledge). This is useful for crafting effective inform/influence and public relations campaigns, so I would recommend that usage continue and expand.|
This assignment got me thinking; how easy would it be to train PSYOP and IO soldiers to use these commercial off-the-shelf tools? It seems to me that this would be a lot cheaper than using more expensive, intel-focused tools like Palantir. It would also provide soldiers with transferable skills they could later use as entrepreneurs or job-seekers.
This also got me thinking further about my own knowledge gaps. I’ll have to dig more into these tools in the coming months.
References:
Marvin, Rob. “Zoho Social.” PCMAG, PCMAG.COM, 29 Aug. 2017, http://www.pcmag.com/review/347391/zoho-social.
Marvin, Rob, and Alyson Behr. “The Best Social Media Management & Analytics Tools of 2018.” PCMAG, PCMAG.COM, 1 Sept. 2017, www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2491376,00.asp (Links to an external site.).
Tuten, Tracy L., and Michael R. Solomon. Social Media Marketing. Sage, 2015.
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