Nice food for thought there. To answer your questions, i would like to introduce Brandtology’s service because we are ALREADY servicing global brands across multiple continents/languages and we understand their needs. Most of our clients prefer a single dashboard where they can access data across all their markets and a standard benchmark for comparision across countries. Of course, they do break down the data by countries as well as there are marked differences across culturally different markets.

With more than 100 Social Media Specialists in 10 locations around the world, we are able to verify and enhance our automated machine analysis in more than 9 different languages. This ensures very high accuracy and relevancy of the analysis reports provided to our clients who do not have to waste a moment sieving through irrelevant data. Our Social Media Specialists are also able to provide localised insights into the conversations being analysed as they are citizens of the countries under study.

Ashley Lim
Social Media Consultant
Brandtology
http://www.brandtology.com

No problem at all. The website is a great idea and a nice way to see what others have done in the past and how their Facebook Pages look now. I did check out your website before but I’ll keep my eye on it this month.

Always interesting to see the email alerts pop up for the gallery. Thanks for the link.

You might be interested in taking a closer look at http://www.northsocial.com which is a few weeks away from offering a suite of 16 FB applications that let users easily customize their Facebook pages.

Hoping the apps will grow the number of pages that are “gallery-worthy.”

Enjoy,
-Alex

Thank you for the comment and feedback. It’ll be interesting to see how this country specific monitoring is going to work out. This is going to be an interesting time as we move forward and see how brands manage their brand online.

I agree with working with one tool but my challenge is that not all tools are really going to be able to manage and learn the culture and language of Asia, if they are based in North American. It’ll be interesting to see how the tools handle this challenge. Maybe this means a consolidation of tools in the near future.

1. Should global brands being using a different social media monitoring tool for each continent?
Answer: I would think more in terms of country specific monitoring, and deeper still, language specific. Continental or regional monitoring is too wide (i.e. there are probably multiple languages in each continent or region).

2. Will teams need to start to be continent based?
Answer: Again, country/language specific yes – depending on the capabilities of each team, you may be able to support multiple languages by one team. That team can be based anywhere physically as long as they understand the language, culture and industry being monitored in each market.

3. Will the need for an agitator to combine each continents information into one dashboard exist?
Answer: Possibly, but from a country/language perspective – the major monitoring players should be developing this capability themselves as country/language specific dashboards.

4. Are global brands even beginning to think this way?
Answer: Absolutely. Most recognize the need to monitor from a country/language specific perspective – the difficulty lies for global brands to monitor across the many diverse cultures and languages around the world.

Additional thoughts:
It is best for global brands to closely work with one monitoring tool – as long as that tool can provide the best solution in each country/language specific market that is a priority. The reasons are plenty, but revolve mainly around leveraging best practices, costs, brand/corporate knowledge and global comparative analyses.

Thank you for the comment. I didn’t go into any matrix style comparsion for this. It was really a gut check and what I liked as a consumer in the end. Some brands I felt weren’t pushing the envolope enough with their Facebook Page.

Thanks,

Johnathan

Thanks for the comment. I never did get around to doing the excel report as Forrester came out with a similar report:

http://www.creativetraction.com/2009/07/24/forrester-wave-social-media-listening-platforms-q1-2009/

You should check that out for a comparison of the tools. I hope this helps.