Ann Longley (MediaEdge:CIA) Shares her Thoughts on Social Media Management

I finally had a chance to put together a series of questions for Ann Longley, who's working as a digital strategy director for a global social marketing media agency known as MediaEdge:CIA and based out of UK. Ann is blogging at Networked Communications, twittering at @AnnMargaret and flickering her travels under the cute name of bluesky2015 :) . As the 3rd social media professional being interviewed here, she kindly shares with us MediaEdge:CIA's process in terms of buzz monitoring, sentiment analysis and gives her thoughts on the Nestle crisis as well as the mobile revolution happening right now. Good stuff.

What's your job at MediaEdge:CIA ? any client case to share with the community ?

I’m a digital strategy director in a UK media agency looking after our burgeoning social media practice. We work with a wide range of clients for every market sector from luxury brands to FMGCs, financial services, telcos and entertainment. It is fascinating to work with them as they adapt to changes in consumer behaviour catalyzed by digital technology. My most interesting clients are the ones with large fan bases online as well as those with a lot of detractors, typically in service oriented businesses. The challenge of turning negative sentiment into positive is an interesting one.

What social media monitoring solution are you using internally ?

We use a combination of free and licensed tools to help our clients understand the conversations relevant to their business. Brighton-based Brandwatch (@brandwatchtweet) is partner of choice at the moment as they seek and encourage our feedback in developing their software and services. To keep our results accurate and our analysis robust, we do a lot of manual data vetting and created customized classification systems based on our clients’ business objectives and requirements.

Any tips on how to reduce the level of "noise" when monitoring social media ? And what's your take on automated sentiment analysis ?

We also continuously refine our search queries which are sometimes are quite long especially for themes or brand names with multiple meanings. It is a very time consuming and labor intensive process at the moment. We also manually assess sentiment as we like to include recommendations in our sentiment scores and that needs to be done by human analysts.

What are the key lessons to remember from Nestle's recent crisis on social media ?

Nestle’s recent social media crisis revealed a brand who had not prioritized social media as a communications platform otherwise they would have demonstrated a better understanding of the medium and how to engage more effectively with their stakeholders online. If you are interested in my thoughts, please visit my blog at AnnLongley.net .

What the mobile revolution means for brands in terms of reputation, business opportunities etc ?

Mobile has tremendous potential to modernize brands and make doing business easier for consumers, however, it is still early days in terms of mobile technology development. I look forward to the time when I can scan products with my mobile phone and get an ethical score to assist me with decision making and then make purchases with my phone.