• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, December 11, 2013

While most brand marketers and PR folks would love to have a crack team of 20-year-old interns monitoring their brand’s social media presence, the fact is that not everyone can necessarily afford it (sure, the interns may be unpaid, but you still have to pay rent for office space, unless you go for the extra-economical abandoned quarry option). That’s especially true for small and mid-sized businesses, where the proprietor or other employees are often doing double duty as social media managers.

With this unmet need in mind, an Australian firm called Dialogue Consulting has launched a new social media monitoring service, SocialSitter, to keep an eye on your social media presence after hours. Dialogue CEO Hugh Stephens explained: “Social media operates 24 hours a day, 7 days a week… [B]rands are increasingly concerned about what happens outside their normal hours -- and those managing the social media profiles can't be there all day, every day.”

According to Dialogue, SocialSitter provides human review of all content posted on Facebook and Twitter within 15 minutes of it being posted (it plans to begin monitoring other social platforms soon). In the event of inappropriate or questionable content, SocialSitter will notify the client’s social media manager or automatically remove the content, depending on the client’s preference.

Stephens emphasized that SocialSitter is limited to notifying social media managers and possibly removing damaging content, meaning it does not respond to the content or interact with the brand’s followers in any way. The service, which costs $7.00 per hour, has a slightly feel-good vibe too, as it works by outsourcing monitoring to unemployed women and young people in developing countries.

Now all we need is a service that monitors all those unpaid social media interns to prevent them from doing something colossally stupid, like, say, using the anniversary of 9/11 or Pearl Harbor as a marketing opportunity.