T1.6 Monitoring Social Networks

We all know about it, and we all do it - social networking is becoming a part of our daily routine. It's how we stay connected, express ourselves, and little do we know; it can help us to run a business. It is obvious that many people criticize others while social networking. However, people are also criticizing businesses. I feel that social networking is a great way for businesses to improve their practices. Businesses should be taking full advantage of these companies that can do mass searches to see what people are saying about a business. The most frequent complaints should obviously be the ones that the business focuses on and strives to change. Personally, I work at Panera Bread. I am social networking often, especially on Twitter. Even though I am just an associate, I see my friends tweeting about complaints that they have with our store, such as the "boring, loud, jazz music." I can go back to my store and simply tell my managers that I have seen this complaint and they have physically walked over and turned the volume down. Clearly, monitoring social networking helps a business with their own weaknesses. However, another extremely beneficial side to monitoring social networking, is exposing other business' weaknesses. These social networking sites are public. Businesses can not only do searches for complaints about their own business, but for complaints about other businesses that they compete with. Take Mac and PC for example. Mac launched a huge campaign against PC, which you have probably all seen. One man is a Mac computer, the other is a PC. The two men go back and forth trying to point out each others weaknesses, and the Mac always "wins." The campaign was clearly successful. What I read about monitoring social networking really reminded me of this and made me think that the use of these monitoring companies could really be put to use to see other companies' weaknesses. It doesn't necessarily have to be used to publicly criticize and contrast, but looking at these weaknesses of competition could help businesses to avoid those weaknesses and better themselves to protect their own reputation on social media websites.