In the PR business we sometimes use fancy terms such as “Share of Voice” to denote the amount of media coverage a client gets. This is often done in direct comparison against what the competition gets and this information is terribly helpful for us in PR to find out how effective our work has been. This is often also taken as a measure of influence.
But now I’m beginning to wonder if that still matters when you can find out what everyone else (the consumer) is talking about. Well, at least online.
Using tweetVolume I can compare quite easily how often my client Motorola is mentioned against the competition on Twitter. Obviously not often enough.
The same can be done for blogs using BlogPulse’s Trend Search. Looks like the results here are pretty much the same as on Twitter. Possibly the same folk presenting similar sentiment on both platforms.
Maybe the best measure of Share of Voice in our hyper-connected world is a mashup of traditional media, blogs, Twitter, and any other posts that presents itself on the social media.
Filed under: Social Media
This is really interesting. Thanks for sharing..
great blog with great contents about marketing!
Regards
Dave Wong
http://www.SuccessEnroute.com
A lot of people talking about it doesn’t necessary mean its a good thing.
Esp when a lot of people saying bad things about the company/product.
@dk What happened to all publicity is good publicity? =P But yes you’re right about that. Maybe then if so many people are talking (or complaining) about Nokia on Twitter, they should start using it for customer care.
ben,
I think talking about it is one thing, but converting chatter into bottom line performance is another. The way I see it, the ephemerality of the social media landscape combined with the idiosyncrasies of bloggers (including yours truly) makes it difficult to sustain a PR campaign solely revolving around new media. We are still searching for the holy grail of citizen journalism.