March 7, 2013 
What is “Triage?” Typically, it’s a medical term, defined as “the process of sorting victims to determine medical priority, in order to increase the number of survivors.”
So how does the concept of “Triage” apply to Social Media Monitoring?
The number of social posts that mention brands continually increases. In 2012, 53% of social media users complimented brands at least once a month. In addition, 50% of social media users expressed concerns or complaints about brands at least once a month in 2012.
If your organization has a social media monitoring program, you are likely becoming overwhelmed with incoming mentions. How is a smart social organization to contend with the growing volume?
One solution is to use Social Monitoring Automation Triage to separate incoming signal from the staggering amount of internet noise. Once this triage phase is complete, you can use manual Triage to sort the Signal, separating posts that require immediate company response from those the simply require research. Finally, a third level of triage can help you connect the optimal employee to the customer, based on the content of the social mention.
On my team, we’ve chosen to segment actionable posts into seven (7) data classes:
- Case: Request for help resolving real-time issue
- Query: Question that doesn’t require support resource
- Rant: Insult that merits brand management consideration
- Rave: Praise from your brand advocate
- Lead: Pronouncement of near-term purchase decision
- RFE: Request to enhance a product with a new feature
- Fraud: Communication from an unauthorized provider of your products
We route posts of each class to a different business function for response, as follows:
- Case: Routed to Technical Support for immediate interaction
- Query: Routed to Information Developers and Technical Writers
- Rant: Routed to PR for brand protection assessment
- Rave: Routed to Marketing for proactive engagement with advocates
- Lead: Routed to Sales for pipeline consideration
- RFE: Routed to Product Management for road map consideration
- Fraud: Routed to Legal for follow-up and official action
By using Social Media Monitoring Triage, wise brands can reach customers on their channel of choice, connecting them to the employees best equipped to meet their needs. This attentive strategy improves customer experience and builds customer loyalty.
For more information about the justification for building this process, see Loyalty and Social CRM on SlideShare.
KnowledgeBishop 
Sounds like an excellent system, Tristan. The flow of the informatuion makes perfect sense and is going to the department that can make the best and most efficient use of it. It would save a lot of internally wasted time for organizations, and give a much better appearance and experience to the customer.
It also sounds like something that should be somewhat scaleble to “human” size as well.
Thanks, Martina. Yes, the process is working very well. We route nearly 10,000 actionable posts each month to the employee best equipped to respond. These employees have core expertise in the applicable product and function, and are trained in social media etiquette as well. The goal is to show the customer how much we value them.
Nice Website. You need to think more details on RSS Feeds being a traffic supply. They bring us a nice little traffic
This is a great system Tristan! It doesn’t just save the organization valuable time, it also paves the way for better customer service.