I don't want to tire of saying it, but, despite the very interesting approach to what to monitor, we once again run into a lack of time or resources (people and money) to do all of this quickly and efficiently...
To this end, there are some tools that can help with this monitoring efficiently and at very low costs. I will mention two tools here, one for social networks and another for news, both with the ability to provide many of the answers to the questions asked a little further up in the text.
Klipbox - This is an online news monitoring tool that indexes over 3 million news items every month and monitors around 30,000 websites, content portals and blogs. It is perfect for monitoring content outside of social networks, and also makes it much easier to distribute the collected content to your constituencies, leaders, donors, etc.
Hootsuite - This is a social media monitoring and management netherlands mobile database tool that unifies the management of multiple networks on a single platform. It is an excellent option for “listening” to voters’ opinions and interacting with them. It is worth mentioning here that it is only possible to “listen” to public comments.
Delivering value through online information monitoring involves several aspects, but mainly through the numbers and metrics generated, which will provide a much more assertive basis for campaign decisions.
Just a side note: Metrics are data collected about some aspect of what is being monitored, and which can help us make a decision for the campaign. A metric can provide an indication of a decision on its own, or in conjunction with another. To illustrate, I will give some examples of metrics.
Number of news published about the candidate
Number of news published about competitors A, B, C…
Number of topics covered for candidate A, B, C
Number of citations of subject A, B, C.. along with citations of candidates A, B, C
Number of calls on the candidate's service channels (Facebook chat, Instagram Direct, candidate's website chat, WhatsApp, email…)
Number of calls by subject
And so it goes... As Peter Drucker would say, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it!”
Ok, but what do you do after you have access to so many metrics? To help understand this data and make it even more “actionable”, that is, transform it into something that will quickly help you make a decision, it is a good idea to create a Business Dashboard with graphs based on these metrics.
There are several ways to create these panels, or as they are also known, Dashboards, which range from very advanced and expensive tools (which is not the case we are dealing with here), to spreadsheets in Excel / Google Drive, or tools such as Cyfe, Gecko, and others that integrate with different systems and display data visually.