The Net-Savvy Executive

Some companies are harder to write about than others. The problem is, I want to avoid writing "X offers the usual services"—even when that's what they do. It's no more a criticism than to say that an airline provides the usual airline service. But it does make it harder to write an interesting profile.

Some approaches are showing up enough that I'm starting to think of them as the Usual List:

• Word/brand associations
  
• Topic detection
  
• Sentiment analysis
  
• Influence analysis
  

Add trend analysis, regular analyst reports, and perhaps a dashboard or alerts on urgent items, and you've described—well, a lot of companies. There are differences to consider, but it's interesting how often I'm tempted to write "the usual services."

Having a Usual List is a good thing. It helps clients and agencies up the learning curve faster, and it frees vendors from explaining every bit of what they do for every prospect. When clients understand the Usual List, vendors can focus on what makes them different. And that's where it gets interesting.

Tags: social media, blog monitoring