Revised Study Reminds Brands Of The Blind Spot

Social analytics platform Venuelabs first alerted us to the existence of a huge brand blind spot in social monitoring in 2011. The software, which focuses on monitoring your online storefronts — Yelp pages, Foursquare pages, Facebook pages, etc. — rather than performing keyword-based social monitoring like most listening platforms, is a slightly different spin on brand listening. Venuelabs’ perspective is to focus on your owned social pages.

We did a fairly deep dive into this conflict when Venuelabs’ first report emerged. Social monitoring firms generally confirmed they can (or do) monitor your storefronts. But for the non-standard’s (Twitter, Facebook, etc.), you — the brand — likely have to go in and manually set those tertiary ones up. In other words, they probably don’t monitor your pages on UrbanSpoon or Yelp automatically for you.

What Venuelabs is trying to do is sell their software by pointing out that keyword-based monitoring misses these branded storefronts. What they assume, however, is that brands aren’t already doing that. Sure, their software makes it easier. But if there’s a brand out there involved in social at all that is ignoring their storefronts — in fact, not manually checking them regularly — well, they kinda get what they deserve, don’t they?

Still, when Venuelabs set up analysis of many top-tier brands as if they were performing keyword-based monitoring, then compared it to its location-specific type, the results were stunning:

So, are you monitoring your online storefronts? Do you even know where all of yours are? (HINT: If you are a restaurant or retail location, you may have Yelp, UrbanSpoon, Google Places or other local-centric service pages you aren’t even aware exist.) If not, you may want to address the issue.

And know that keyword-based monitoring isn’t all you need to do.