Introduction
For a new-age customer of today, it's a common tendency to go onto the internet and find information about products and brands before buying them, even if the products are bought offline from the retail stores. Along with the product evaluation, people do come across general public opinion about a brand. Word of mouth is ubiquitous on the world wide web, and people just love writing about their opinions on anything and everything on blogs, social media sites, etc. and their experiences with products, brands and the stores that sell them. Today, a negative comment about any brand or business has a potential of spreading like wildfire, across the globe.

There is thus a great need for brands to take control over this medium and use it effectively to increase positive disposition toward them, or reduce the negativity. It's therefore imperative to monitor these conversations and counter it or act on it.

Social Media encompasses platforms where real people can generate content. The platform like blogosphere, wiki, microblogging, social networking sites, (such as facebook, twitter, orkut, bigadda, etc.) document, video & photo sharing websites are examples of where people share their opinions, interest and word-view specific to brands, products, etc.

The stages are two-fold: monitoring what people are saying on a regular basis, and then countering it through posts, and using the tried and tested principles of good customer service.

Stage 1: Social Media Monitoring

This is the age of socializing on internet, even if you and your contact are sitting in the next cubicle. A large number of surfers spend considerable amount of their time online on social networking sites, interacting and sharing information with friends, families, colleagues and complete strangers. There are hundreds and thousands of special interest communities online and these communities are potential influencers. Given the multiplicity of sites, it is necessary to find a tool and mechanism to track these sources and find out what people are saying about your brand and to be part of the discussion, wherever feasible.

Social Media monitoring means discovering conversations in real time on the internet, understanding, positive/negative opinions (sentiment analysis), knowing gender, age and location, watching trends develop and drilling down to the individual influencer. For effective achievement there is need for a comprehensive tool which tracks all the conversations happening on the net, simultaneously.

Tools like SM2 scan & index online conversations and comments, and store them in a 'social media warehouse' which can be used for analysis, gauging the sentiments, generating reporting and real time alerts.

Stage 2: Taking Action

There are numerous freeware and paid tools available in the market but these tools throw up raw data. Very often marketers do not have the time and resources to process the data further to get a meaningful insight of the social media interactions. The need is to generate insights from the data and therefore marketers need a solution and not a tool.

Marketers need a solution which not only converts data into insights, but also packages insights with suggestions about your new product or package. The social media monitoring tool needs to be profile based with concrete objectives which can be used to measure the ROI.

Let's say we want to monitor the conversation about a brand. The value we can derive is identification of opportunities in social media. If the monitoring can lead to prompt responses and trouble shooting of negative PR or word of mouth about the brand online, then that can enhance the ROI of the campaigns being executed by the brand in the online and offline media

The tools like SM2 can be used to monitor ongoing campaigns, but the solution lies in integrating the insights from the tool with PR activities, social media campaigns and other marketing initiatives which would help to build a positive disposition towards the brands and generate ideas for new products and markets. It can help in efficient identification of influencer and brand advocates as well as a low cost mechanism for research on own and competitor brands.

Given that the power of the online communities in spreading word of mouth opinion - both positive and negative - it is time that marketers make the task of monitoring the "noise" that their brands are generating online on a priority basis. Else, they will only find to their own peril, that the marketing spends that they incur do not deliver the ROI that they had envisaged.