The unofficial “industry” that Spiral16 is most often referred to as being a part of is the social media monitoring industry.

But that’s not really accurate, is it?

Whether you are brand monitoring, gathering competitive intelligence, doing crisis management, or researching for product development, there is a whole lot more that you should be looking at than social media.

Let’s call it Internet monitoring instead.

Internet monitoring tools enable you to be a social media trailblazer, but in reality you’re still following a path beaten into the ground by those who got to the space before you.

Who influences the influencers?

When companies dive into the online space, more often than not they’re simply gathering up voices and listening to what people are saying, and not taking into account what information might have influenced those voices in the first place.

How much time and energy should be spent collecting what people are saying if you’re ignoring the non-social sources that are typically our first destination when looking up material online? When you search for products, names, or topics online, how often is a site like Wikipedia the most prominent non-sponsored link in the results? More tellingly, how often are you ignoring the “why” of an opinion to focus on the “what”?

Look at the graphic above. This is the FULL spectrum of relevant URLs on one topic.

This includes Blogs, Social media sites, and Video sites, but it also includes the News, General, and Shopping categories.

Below is a good guide for categorization of different site types, although there will always be exceptions to the rule. (Example: A press release, normally categorized under News, may be reprinted on a blog.)

• Blogs – Non-traditional publishing with a focus on commentary or opinion.
• Social – Public-facing microblogs (Twitter), social communities and networks (Flickr), forums, and social bookmarking sites (Reddit).
• Video – Any audio/visual content (YouTube, Vimeo).
• News – Traditional news and editorial content, press releases, and event reporting.
• Shopping – Commercial and retail-oriented sites (Amazon, Target).
• General – General online content, reference, or user reviews (Wikipedia, Ask.com, Yelp, About.com) that falls outside of traditional news or blogs.

Now here’s a visualization (to the right) of the same topic with the URLs categorized as News, General, or Shopping omitted:

As you can see, looking at Blogs, Social, and Video gives you only about half the picture.

What’s the point of mapping blogs and social media sites if you are ignoring News sites and General sites? Are the Social sites and Blogs the place where information originates from—or do the bloggers and tweeters start looking somewhere else before they actually voice their opinion?

If that information isn’t linked as a reference in an article, there’s no way to track it back to its source, but that doesn’t mean its not being viewed by people and it isn’t relevant. It’s both.

There is tremendous value in finding the posts where the bloggers and social media users are getting information about you. When it comes to influence rankings, a page more likely to be viewed by your potential target audience should be ranked higher than one that is not.

This is a broad generalization, but in some respects, it gets the point across:

The Blogs and Social categories are the scorched Earth. The News and General categories are the matches that lit the fire.

What do you think?

Tagged as: Internet listening, internet monitoring, platform, services, social media crisis, social media engagement, social media industry, social media listening, social media measurement, social media solution, social media strategy, social media tracking, social media trend, social media trends, trends, visual mapping