social media monitoring assignment
I’m always looking for ways to integrate more social media assignments into the core classes, so when I heard this idea at the National Communication Association PR division’s “teaching social media panel” with friends Barbara Nixon, Kelli Matthews, Tiffany Derville Gallicano, Alisa Agozzino & Bill Handy — I knew I had to try it.
And so this semester I have my students monitoring real clients and producing 3 social media monitoring reports on the client throughout the semester. The purpose is not only to show them how to measure social media, but to allow them to do it over time for tracking purposes and come to a deeper understanding of what metrics really matter.
Each student will follow an assigned client all semester. The student will create a monthly report, determining the baseline in the first report then trending data for the 2nd and 3rd reports.
Here is the information I gave to my students in the handout, and the video (.mov) I made to explain the basic assignment.
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This on-going assignment will have you tracking your client throughout the semester and creating a total of three reports detailing trends in online conversation.
Resources
The following social media monitoring resources may help identify conversations about your client.
- Search all social media: Addcitomatic, IceRocket, Yahoo! Pipes, Samepoint, Social Mention
- Twitter searches and metric tools: tweetgrid, Twazzup, trendistic, twitalyzer, tweeteffect, tweetstats, twitturly, tweetvolume, trendpedia
- Blogs: blogsearch.google.com, postrank
- SEO: google.com/insights/search
- Facebook: facebook.com/lexicon/
Be sure to also consider searching Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo, Viddler and any other social site you can find!
Tips
- Make the layout of the report consistent from month-to-month
- Use graphics and minimize text
- Specify what you think the goal for the client should, include target audience: focus data around that
- Avoid heavy text that will be complex to process
- Track: topics, tone, message salience, word-of-mouth, engagement, etc.
- Set up system to collect data throughout month & code as you go (content analysis)
Read blog posts seek out current resources on best practices for metrics and monitoring.
- Social networks: http://www.kayesweetser.com/archives/206
- Twitter: http://www.kayesweetser.com/archives/214
- Viral video: http://www.kayesweetser.com/archives/221
- Photosharing: http://www.kayesweetser.com/archives/223
- Todd Defren’s blog: http://www.pr-squared.com/
- KD Paine’s blog on measurement: http://kdpaine.blogs.com/
Requirements
- Each report is only limited to one page (and no, not 2-sided), margins unimportant
- Provide basic information on how each metric was measured (parameters, search terms, method, etc.)
- If reporting a statistic garnered from an online tool, cite the tool as the source
- If publishing a graphic created by an online tool, cite the tool as the source
Turning it in
- Print a copy (in color if desired), place the print out on the table at front of class
- E-mail a PDF of what you turned in to professor no later than 11:59 p.m. on the day the report was due, subject line will be client / report # (example: @NavyNews / report 1)
- Late work never accepted and the assignment is not fully turned in until professor has both the print out and the PDF
Very cool assignment, Kaye. Could a business use parts of this assignment to monitor their SM or that of their competitors? I’m a business professor so I’d like to learn more about what you are doing with SM in communications. Thanks! Bret
Very well structured assignment to help students understand results they’ll be expected to produce in the real world. As a recent grad I can attest that this assign is very accurate for practice; I think I might pick up a few tips by applying this exercize to my work…
Bret:
100% you could do this in business, marketing, PR, etc. In fact, I would suggest that one’s competitors be monitored alongside their own mentions so that you get an overall idea of what the conversation about your issues and industry are online. What my students are doing would be very easily adapted to monitoring the competitor because my students do NOT have access to their assigned clients’ internally tracked metrics like google analytics etc — they only have what is out there & publicly published for all.
Thanks for reading!
Matt:
If you have any tips for students, please pass them along. With this assignment in mind, I am doing a “1 metric, 1 minute” YouTube series (http://www.youtube.com/user/kayesweetser#grid/user/1224FBE112213BE9) this semester to get the students up to speed (initially they are overwhelmed by sheer mass of data). Also, the main reason this is a semester-long assignment is so that they really get comfortable with what to measure & what matters. I think repetition will help that in a way a one-shot assignment wouldn’t.
Kaye – sounds like a great panel, one that will bring real-world experience to students. If Samepoint can help by providing you with our monitoring and metrics platform, let us know.
The resources you have provided has helped me in my social monitoring report so much! This is so vital for businesses to fully understand their customers’ thoughts, ideas, opinons, etc about their product. My social monitoring topic: Verizon and At&t
Interesting; check out WP-Stats-Dashboard for social metrics monitoring on your WordPress dashboard.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-stats-dashboard/screenshots/
Bret:
100% you could do this in business, marketing, PR, etc. In fact, I would suggest that one’s competitors be monitored alongside their own mentions so that you get an overall idea of what the conversation about your issues and industry are online. What my students are doing would be very easily adapted to monitoring the competitor because my students do NOT have access to their assigned clients’ internally tracked metrics like google analytics etc — they only have what is out there & publicly published for all.
Thanks for reading!
Hi Kaye,
I’m planning on using something very similar in my class (and did use a few ideas from your assignment, so thank you!), and was wondering:
Did you give them a list of clients for your class to choose? If so, would you mind sharing that list? Was it companies, celebrities, or what?
I’m trying to find a good balance between too much information (which can be overwhelming) and too little (which may make writing the assignment hard and boring).
Thanks!
Danny.