Social Media Monitoring Assignment
May 9, 2012 
I learned a lot about some of the social media tools that marketers are able to use when researching and monitoring their brand and public image online. Radian6 was the best tool that we used and because of all its features, it’s not surprising that it costs a lot of money for companies to use it. Radian6 was a big help when we were searching social media mentions on our Petsmart brand’s competitor, Petco. Unlike the free tools, my group was able to block all posts related to Petco Park and only get results based on the pet store. Another thing my group learned was that the free social media tools were not always accurate in their assessment of positive or negative feedback. For example, the screen shot from Tweetfeel.com below shows that it includes both Petco store and Petco Field and that some are accurately marked negative, but the post talking about Petco not being a small place is actually a positive thing compared to the rest of the post, but Tweetfeel counted it as a negative post. Some of our key findings for our project was that Petco did a really bad job at addressing the dog ear cutting incident and that they always have job openings which lead us to believe that they are not hiring or properly training employees to do certain jobs and that is why incidents like this occur. Petsmart does a great job at getting their deals out to their target market and also promoting their “pets are family” slogan by having customers sign their pet up to receive a free gift during the month of their birthday. Throughout the time spent on the project, I learned a lot of great tools that I hope to be able to use in my future jobs and will help my company better handle social media monitoring of our brand.
emilybaal 