You’d never speed down the freeway at night with your headlights turned off. You’d never walk down a busy city street blindfolded. And you’d certainly never stroll around a business conference or networking event shouting about your brand or product…while wearing noise-cancelling headphones.

It’s preposterous even to suggest such things.

Why then do so many brands fail to do basic brand monitoring on social networks, and across the Internet more generally? It’s the digital media equivalent of flying blind.

Original research reported here in How B2B Tech Marketing on Twitter is Changing showed that of nearly 400 B2B SaaS companies active on Twitter, just 23% responded to brand mentions in any way, and only 6% went beyond a simple “like.” Further:

“As a follow-on experiment, 22 brand monitoring software tools were reviewed in a separate post, which was tweeted out multiple times. Just four (18.2%) of the 22 responded, showing that even the companies whose business is brand monitoring largely fail at it.”

Online brand monitoring isn’t difficult or expensive. But failing to do it can be very costly. Here are five reasons why.
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