Your brand killed like Osama?

Osama bin Laden was killed, taken by surprise, although a neighbour was reporting live what was going on, using Twitter. If only Al Qaeda had cared about its leader as you care about your brand, they would have taken social media more seriously. Social media could have been their eyes and ears in picking up the news that an attack on Osama was imminent. Not unlike you picking up trends through Twitter and Facebook monitoring, Al Qaeda could have picked up helicopters were leaving their base. They could have known that American choppers were flying in their direction. They could have initiated terrorist responses even before bin Laden was attacked. Luckily they did not monitor social media.But do you want to miss out on trends, news events and see your brand severely damaged by ignoring digital social channels?

The guy in Osama’s neighborhood, whose Twitter name is @reallyvirtual, lives nearAbbottabad, heard helicopters flying over and started to tweet about it. He said he didn’t have a clue he was reporting the raid on Osama live. In his tweets he made some deductions: (sic) “Since taliban (probably) don’t have helicopters, and since they’re saying it was not “ours”, so must be a complicated situationâ€

In his tweets we follow the crash of one helicopter; we receive a map with the place where the helicopter crashes etc… And then a few tweets later, after the breaking news from the White House, he realizes he had been reporting live on the raid on Osama. So if you are protecting someone hidden inAbbottabad, why don’t you monitor online everything going on in that town?

If Al Qaeda had a social media monitoring strategy, it would have been the weakest link for the CIA: social media monitoring allows to scan the Internet and all social networks, filtering messages on all possible topics, words AND places. So if you try to hide someone somewhere nowadays, you don’t do this using only high walls and barbed wire anymore.

Social media monitoring makes it possible to multiply the ears and eyes you need with a tremendous factor. Anybody can be important to your country or your business.

It is your opportunity to filter and search for the right messages that can affect or influence your business. Whether you are a commercial organization, a non-profit organization or a country, today’s events illustrate that it is time to put serious attention and resources into your social media strategy.