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!

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-stats-dashboard/screenshots/

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.

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!