Many companies still haven’t found a proper social media strategy and are in the meantime experimenting in blogs, on Facebook, or Twitter, even though they actually often have no idea where their customers exchange information among each other.

They use social networks in the first place to promote their products and seem to completely leave behind the analysis of the various channels content and the implementation of the results in their marketing strategy.

That this has to change is out of question and JamiQ’s multilingual social media monitoring software has a lot to offer, as it helps businesses listen, measure, and gain insights from conversations taking place online.

JamiQ uses advanced data mining and natural language processing technology to produce real-time buzz trending, sentiment detection, influence scoring, and market segmentation that gives businesses the critical insights they need for immediate and strategic decision-making.

Knowing this, it is a pity that so many marketers still fall into the trap of measuring social media success based on generic measures such as the number of hits, number of referrals and level of engagement. Though they may be relevant, success should actually be measured in the context of the task in hand - the ability to reach, identify and convert influencers as well as the effectiveness of the ‘influencer’ to spread the word to desired consumers.

Benjamin Koe, JamiQ’s Head, Client Leadership, is aware of the problem, explaining: “Knowing what's being said publicly about your company's brand, products, services, and even people are of utmost importance to managing the reputation of a business and its communication needs. With the online and social media now becoming mainstream, our mindset and approach towards monitoring what is being said about our companies in the public space will have to evolve to take advantage of these new opportunities”.

According to JamiQ’s spokesperson “using the right tools improves significantly a company’s ability to cope with the evolution in the social media arena“, as it will help them identify who's really influential and who's just talking to a wall. And he believes profoundly that the foundation of social media monitoring is the ability to capture most, if not all, online conversations. Just like a search engine, the more web pages that are covered the better the service. Therefore, his company uses extensively the world's best search engines, APIs, RSS feeds, and specially built web crawlers to monitor the social media in real-time and even specializes in monitoring the diverse and multilingual Asian social media due to their strategic positioning. However, as the social media phenomenon is a global one that impacts every country, JamiQ gives their clients the option to monitor social media in any language, from any market and even provides a one-click translation option for any foreign language post.

"The benefits of what we do for our clients are clear”, says Benjamin, “it is almost impossible to manually track and measure what is being said about your brand online because there's just too much data from too many platforms. As a consequence, any company keen to analyse the social media needs technology to aid the research.” One of the best features of their system is, according to him, its ability to detect a growing crisis, where their system automatically sends an update to the customer as soon as it identified spikes in the trend.

In addition, JamiQ visualizes the buzz of all the entries over any date range, even down to the hours in a day, while links to frequently used date ranges and interactive charts provide quick access to the most critical data. In general their dashboard provides an easy to manage quick overview of the most recent updates on all important topics. Not to mention that their smart algorithms automatically analyze the influence of every website on the fly, which is again visualized by a chart that gives you an instant view of the impact your brand is making on the social media.

Just as important knowing what is said about you, is knowing where the conversations are taking place, JamiQ uses its smart algorithms to discover which country a post comes from and what media type it is (blog, forum, news, etc.), too. This gives their customers the ability to zoom in on their local market and appropriate media types.

Since September 2008, when JamiQ was founded, the company seems to have come a long way. It managed to grow its offering from a simple monitoring technology to a complete social media dashboard within this short period of time.

Up to the task of meeting such fast movements - social media monitoring becomes increasingly important to PR, crisis and issues management, advertising ROI, campaign evaluation, reputation management, and customer service – JamiQ knows that it is key to all of them to stay informed on what’s being said online, thinking: “Let’s talk about business!”

By Daniela La Marca