Whew!  After numerous ideation sessions, hours upon hours of planning, editing, and producing, and days of stressful deadlines, you’ve got your ad airing via your desired media.

Now what do you do?  Traditionally, the next step in the marketing cycle is to analyze performance.

However, in today’s digital world, analysis does not come simply from traditional metrics.  A significant portion of the analysis process comes both qualitatively and quantitatively from listening to feedback and gathering data from across as many different forms of media as possible.  Perhaps the best way to discover how consumers respond to an ad is by engaging in social listening.  Recently, our friends at Radian6 described some of their top tips for making social listening worth the investment. 

One top recommendation is to continually adjust “key phrases” based on social response.  Social monitoring utilities help bring together relevant posts from across the digital landscape, allowing brand managers to observe reactions and results almost in real-time.  To make this process even easier, Radian6 suggests using campaign-specific hashtags.  In addition to making it even easier for social experts to categorize relevant posts, social monitoring and subsequent interaction can help transform a normal user simply responding to a commercial into a brand advocate.

@MatthewBick