There are two vital reasons PR professionals should monitor Social Media. Understanding them can bring critical improvements to your media strategy. The debate between professional media services (newspapers, TV news, magazines) and Social Media or bloggers, Twitterers and video bloggers has been raging for years. No doubt it will continue. Many large enterprises still shun recognizing, let alone monitoring, Citizen Media. This can be a dangerous approach for any size of company. The key is to understand just why monitoring, managing and measuring Citizen Media is important.

Enterprises tend to focus on monitoring only professional media, usually as it relates to the stories and coverage the corporation is trying to get out. PR professionals use clipping and wire services to capture coverage and then use that as their success/failure metric. The standard is to look at a press release, monitor coverage by major news outlets and then say “we got coverage in 200 newspapers and 20 syndicate news stations on TV and 30 radio spots.” All ideally based around some form of press release. But rarely will a VP of public relations stand up and say “42 bloggers covered us and 6 of them wrote steaming articles and 10 video bloggers made commentaries and we had 3,000 Twitters…” The difference is the understanding of the medium, the intent of the medium and the way it works.

Professional news coverage means a journalist covers a story, hopefully putting your company’s point of view at the forefront. You can determine the number of articles and you can guess the coverage. A high-interest story may get 3-4 articles over a period of say or weeks. But in essence, professional coverage is more “tangible” and it is “finite” with an ending time frame. This makes it easier to monitor and manage and move on to the next story. It is also much easier to control the message.

With Citizen Media, this all goes lopsided. The primary issue with Social Media is twofold; 1) it is not necessarily factual, it is about opinion and viewpoints, 2) it is not finite. A blogger may cover your industry, sector or just your company, ad nauseum for weeks or months on end. A blogger is also not necessarily concerned with the facts or your angle in particular. So it is often easier, and perceived as safer, to discredit Citizen Media. PR professionals know that as soon as they “recognize” a citizen, they have transferred some degree of “power” to that blogger, which can inflame the story. A blogger, however, may barrel on anyway.

So the key difference with Citizen Media is that it is about “opinion” whereas professional media is ideally about “fact”. Consumers and readers will view professional coverage as being better and may either form their ideal impression there or conclude their impression/view there. With Citizen Media, a consumer may use that information to further evaluate their views on a topic.

Recognizing these key differentiators can help a PR professional to better “manage the message” as well as understand the “sentiment” of consumers, since bloggers will often take their cue from a press release or professional media coverage. The PR team can also pass along valuable product/service information to the marketing team to improve product development…and there’s more, but that’s where we get paid.