Robot vs. researcher for digital monitoring?
When people search for your brand online or on social, what do they see? Is it your website? Your newest demo video? Or is it complaints about your product? Negative Glassdoor posts about your CEO?
You don’t want to be caught by surprise when it comes to your brand’s digital presence, which is why it’s important to proactively monitor your mentions and other relevant chatter.
Shopping for this support can be a challenge, but this guide will help you assess what makes the most sense for your needs. There are essentially two types of digital monitoring support:
Tools. With tools, you can feed in keywords and topics and be met with an endless stream of media mentions, social media notifications, and more. These are great for the breadth of what they are able to find but often fall short when it comes to any deep insights, which you are then left to pull out.
Researchers. A digital listening and research firm like ours is able to offer a human touch and actionable insights. Hiring corporate research or digital listening firm is perfect if you have a few very sensitive and important topics that you need an expert partner to analyze and report on so you don’t have to.
For a better look at how the two compare in terms of features and usage, check this out:
Fast Feature Comparisons
| Digital Monitoring Tool | Digital Listening Researcher |
|---|---|
| Will find every single mention across the internet | Will only focus on the mention that matter to you |
| Can quickly switch between different topics | Best used to deep-dive key topics, especially before, during, and immediately after important news cycles |
| Will show you Tweets and other social posts that mention keywords or brands | Provides detailed context behind relevant posts, their authors, and the implication for your brand |
| Primarily focuses on social channels with APIs (especially Twitter) and traditional media monitoring | Can assess niche channels like YouTube, Reddit, and Glassdoor through a human lens |
| Only provides raw data | Provides detailed analysis which likely only makes sense for more sensitive or high-priority topics |
| Requires your team to review and make actionable insights and recommendations to leadership | Our team acts as an extension of yours to provide insights and actionable reporting |
What you should use either for:
| Digital Monitoring Tool | Digital Listening Researcher |
|---|---|
| Immediate keyword alerts | Assessing sentiment and importance as it relates to your brand’s interests |
| Creating your ongoing book of press mentions, social advocates, and other databases you need to maintain internally | Monitoring highly sensitive or priority topics on an ongoing basis (e.g. 5G, vaccines, political entities, mergers, prominent figures, etc.) |
| Teams that need to quickly switch their monitoring focus from one topic to another based on current events | One-time tailored corporate research projects such as assessing top search results for overall sentiment, creating a detailed audit of everywhere a topic is mentioned for legal action, researching what audiences value in corporate action, etc. |
If you had to choose: If you’re a large brand that can dedicate a full-time role to reviewing mentions and reporting that data to leadership, you should do so—and empower that position with all of the monitoring tools they need to be successful. If you can’t afford that kind of coverage, though, or want an expert strategist to research specific and sensitive pieces then outsource it to a research firm like ours
Best case scenario: You’ll use both. These aren’t often a one: one replacement. Tools can’t accurately give you sentiment, they don’t know if an exclamation mark is happy or mad. Likewise, a human researcher can’t possibly find every mention of an enterprise-level brand. You need a human element to tell you the difference between good, bad, and neutral mentions backed by a tool so that nothing ever falls through the cracks.
The verdict: If you can, get a tool for your high-level monitoring (and immediate alerts for mentions) and get a research firm like Lumino to provide a big-picture strategic overview, especially for high priority and sensitive topics. If you can’t get both, prioritize whether you actually need every single mention or if it’s better to only have the mention that matters most paired with the context to do something about them.
