Social media monitoring: LAR model revisited

Late last year when I worked at Apis Design, we blogged about a simple social media monitoring process and we called it LAR model. LAR stands for Listen, Analyze and Respond. Recently I’ve been looking at web monitoring more closely and identified one more step – Measure. This post will go over the key stages of this new updated model.

Listen to social media space

Listening is the most important business skill. It does not only help you communicate but it also saves you from saying stupid things. Listen first – is the golden rule. In social media listening is even more important. Knowing people’s problems first helps you get to the right conversations at the right time. Once you’re able to understand what the problem is it’s way easier to solve it, thereby building a stronger relationship. There are a few tools that will help you get better at listening. I like Google Reader. And, as I promised to some of my colleagues, I’m working on creating a step by step guide on how to use it to monitor social media.

Analyze your results

Once you set your social media monitor (a tutorial is coming up in a couple of weeks), and get a list of relevant news items, it’s time to look at the list and do some analysis. It’s actually much simpler than it sounds, no semantic analysis involved at this stage yet. All you need to know if that you are looking for either opportunities or threats in those news items. Some things may hurt your business and you should look though the list to pinpoint those. On the other hand, spotting the right opportunity will get you a raise or increase market share of your company.

Look at it from a funnel perspective:

• first you have a large list filled with tonnes of irrelevant information
• then you filter all the garbage out and are left with a smaller list with only the items that are relevant
• finally, at the end of your analysis stage, you should end up with a small list of actionable items, which will graduate you to the next step – engage!

Engage in social media

Social media engagement is a tricky thing. Many people start their social media journey with it. They create a Twitter account, start a Facebook page and a Youtube channel. And the most common question is “what do I do now?”. In this case, you’ll notice that engagement only comes after we listened and understood the problems our audience is having. By this stage, you’ll probably have a few solutions ready. Now you can go out and start solving problems by still listening to relevant conversations (either via Google Alerts, Google Reader or using real-time search tools like search.twitter.com). I won’t go into a lot of details here, but I will commit to write a process guide to this and other stages of this social media monitoring process.

Measure social media engagement

By now, you will have engaged into a few conversations on Twitter, Facebook pages or Linkedin and will want to see what works and what does not. This crucial stage does not necessarily have to be the last. Some social media tool providers have it second after listening. Having it last is just my interpretation of the process. Anyways, at this stage we start talking about ROIs, different ways to measure your social media engagement and some hard numbers.

Believe it or not :), defining your social media engagement is not as straightforward. I’m not saying it’s difficult, I’m saying it’s not always as simple as previous 3 stages. The main reason is that something that worked for one audience in one market does not necessarily have to work in others. There are things though that are general enough and can be applied to different cases. And this is exactly the topic of a separate guide on how to measure social media engagement. And, guess what? It’s coming up!

I recently presented this model at one of Calgary’s meetup groups. The presentation is available on my online marketing presentations page. Let me know if you have questions or feel that I’m missing something.