Social media monitoring is all the rage. You’d think that it’s a just cool, trendy thing to have as a marketer, right? Wrong. Social media monitoring (SMM) is a serious tool that shouldn’t be taken lightly, alas it might just become shelfware (you know, the stuff that sits on a shelf and gets all dusty after people bore of it.).
As Steve Farnsworth points out in his recent blog post, most social media monitoring software becomes shelfware due to the “lack of vision, and understanding of smart practices around implementation and adaptation.”
How then is a marketer to prepare themselves? It’s important to ask the right questions, know what to look for and to make the right decisions. I went in search of some of that information and recently requested a demo with the folks over Radian6 to find out (I had already checked out SM2 and a few others in the past year or so).
Here’s the thing, marketers tend to get wrapped up in dog and pony shows, bells and whistles, etc. No doubt, tools like Radian6 are very snazzy. I was mesmerized by the account manager zipping around showing me everything their platform could do. But that is not enough when spending a part of an already tight budget. Marketers need to dig deeper into WHY and what they and their organizations need when considering an investment in social media monitoring software.
Here are some questions to keep in the back of your mind when reviewing your social media monitoring options. And I am sure there are many, many more – feel free to add them in the comments if you’ve already been down this path!
The MOST important question:
Where Do You Get Your Data?
This is important! If you were thinking that SMM software scours Google for you, you’d be wrong. Most SMM companies have their own proprietary Internet crawlers or they have partnerships third-party monitoring companies like Moreover, wool.labs, Blinkx, Boardreader, etc. The result? No two SMM companies will provide you with the same data. You need to know what data is most important to you as an organization and select accordingly.
Some others:
- How far back do you pull data? (Note: Look for an SMM company that can retrieve at least two years.)
- How can I filter the data you retrieve? What are the options?
- How can I segment the data?
- How can I remove garbage like spam, flogs/splogs, irrelevant data, etc.?
- How does your auto-sentiment work? Can I edit it? Do your algorithms learn my sentiment edits over time?
- What kind of support services do you offer? What’s the cost? (Note: Not all sentiment is 100%. Closer to 40-70%. Most SMM companies offer professional services to help you get closer.)
- What types of data and how much can be exported for additional reporting and analysis?
- How many users do you support and what is the additional cost?
- What are the options for assigning follow-up to co-workers or other departments?
- How do you charge? Is it by brand, company, user, profile? (Note: Some charge by profile, if you are an organization with multiple brands, it’s important to ask about cost.)
- Where do you specialize? Which social media channel is your strongest? Do you cover traditional and social media?
- How do you help find influencers (Note: Not those with large follower/fan counts – that’s not enough. I am referring to people who truly motivate other people to action.)?
- How deep are your analytics? Do they provide actionable insights?
- Do you offer education/training resources?
Obviously, it takes a lot of internal work to get ready for this type of investment and no SMM company can help you with that. Is there consensus among your CMO, CTO, CEO and legal/HR teams? If so, ask them ALL what they need from a SMM software platform…you might just be surprised what you find out and what the SMM company can (or not!) provide from that perspective.
What else would you add to the list?
Tags: buzz monitoring, Customer Relationships, Marketing, Social Media, Social Media Monitoring
Beth, as you know I do perform strategic monitoring with my company. One question I would love to hear is: how many keywords is reasonable to use?
Too many times customers get into the monitoring process looking for too many keywords and getting in response too much information. Then they get lost.
Gianandrea, yep, I do know that!
That is an excellent addition about keywords…as you and I know there are a few issues there. First, some marketers don’t even know what keywords they should be focusing on (lack of GA experience) and when they DO select keywords, it’s typically from and ‘inside-out’ perspective (i.e. We do “A” therefore people must search on “A”).
So I would add not only how many keywords are reasonable, but which ones?
Beth,
This is a great check list and covers many of the bases that one might want to consider when looking into social monitoring services. You note that it’s important for marketers to dig into why and what they need, though your list is primarily about the how, what and where. So I’d add something about whether or not they offer services to help interpret the data and why the data matters. For instance, why do the different filters matter? There are lots of ways to slice the data, so why use this versus that?
Many marketers are so new to analytics they don’t know what to make of all the information once they get it. So a question about what kind of insight they may provide to help make the data more useful to one’s own specific needs and purposes.
Hi Beth,
Great post and a very smart list of question. I’d also suggest that users consider actually testing for content coverage, not just asking “where do you get your data”. For example, when measuring a count of tweets or blog posts, it isn’t just a matter of every tool having different data, but rather some tools are missing data. If the post or tweet exists and it isn’t in the tool, then it is missing. Testing content coverage is easy: just do a trial using your brand (or some popular keyword like “Obama” or “Dell”, et.) and compare the results. Make sure the content is there and that counts are actual counts, not extrapolated estimates based on a sampling of content.
Other questions/considerations I might add to your list:
1. How do you intend to use the tool? Do you see its use expanding across multiple business functions including customer support, PR, marketing, product management, etc.? Does the platform support workflow, user assignments, classification/notes, etc. Can the platform support the creation of “listening channels” so the right subset of conversations can be seen by the right people.
2. How rich are the social metrics? Yes, insights can come from words, but also the *actions* taken on the social web are extremely important. Can the system give you answers like: a) show me which post mentioning my brand has the most comments right now, b) do posts mentioning my brand get more engagement/comments than my competitor? How many total comments did posts mentioning us get this month vs our competitors?, c) how many twitter users did we reach with our announcement (i.e. agreegate count of followers)?, d) Did posts mentioning “A” send more people to my web site than posts mentioning “B”?, etc.
3. Measurement/ROI. Can the tool associate conversations in social media with actions on your web site? Can you tell which conversations are leading to conversion events, web traffic, etc.? This is achieved through web analytics integration. Isn’t it nice to be able to show that product launch X achieved 100 articles/posts/tweets, that drove 10K page views, 6K new visitors, and 300 conversions?
4. Can the platform easily integrate with other enterprise systems like our company, like CRM? If the company wants to extend the use of these social media conversations into all parts of the company, then it should tie into the tools we already use. Should sales professionals be able to look up their client account in salesforce.com, for example, and see the entire conversation history with the client.
I’m just adding these, well, because you asked, but I think you have a great comprehensive list to start with, Beth. I assume we will see you at SXSW this year?
Cheers,
Marcel
Beth,
Thanks for the reply on Twitter-glad to be a part of this discussion. First, Jason Falls asked me to speak at an AMA Conference in April on this subject.
I talk with many of the leaders of the Brand Monitoring organizations out there, and advise them on these topics of where the market is heading. (Disclosure: I am listed on the http://peoplebrowsr.com Friends list)
So here’s the deal:
• The information out is only as good as the research you did before setting up profiles within any of the systems. If your SEO or PPC programs aren’t working, don;t expect different results. Get the basics down first.
• The data that you have access to is strong adding in some Statistical Analysis models, around correlation of relationships across the media channels, conversation tonality, keyword sets and the search keyword sets. Not trying to make this complex, but this process could add much value here when selling a Social Budget into the boss.
• If you think you will get all the insights from one place, you are in for a surprise, as this takes a “recipe” approach and does not exist in one tool. We add in the data sets around keyword by brand and competition, search insights and seo to come up with a model that gives us tighter messaging and content to use in our social strategy.
So, a mix of hard work in research, testing out some ideas and playing with the data to understand that ROI is achievable, and can be proven, if you know what to look for. All of the companies bring something different to the table.
My recent conference call with 2 CEO’s of really good Brand Monitoring companies made me realize that there are very smart people involved, but we have to know what to ask them for. It will come soon.
Thanks
Dean
Hi Beth:
Great questions – I would like to add two ideas to the mix.
1. What is your goal? Dashboards are great for brand monitoring/CRM/outreach but they are really lousy for insights/research.
2. How good are you at Linguistic Coding? This is alluded to @dean and @marcel above – but I think it is a really big issue. What if you are Enterprise Rental car and you want to monitor for your brand and your competitors? Can you create the linguistic strings that will return relevant results for Budget, National, Dollar, Enterprise and Hertz Rental Cars and exclude all the other references to those words? That is a very difficult example, but most brands are not perfectly un-ambiguous.
3. How important are brands within your category. In food, brands are mentioned in less than 5% of the relevant category conversation. In cars or cellphones it is higher, 40% or so. If you really want something beyond brand monitoring (like insight and understanding) then you need to be looking at category dynamics – not just brand mentions.
4. Dashboard return data. It will take a significant, measurable effort to turn this data into action – much less insights – so plan (and budget) ahead appropriately.
Thanks –
Tom O’Brien
MotiveQuest LLC
@tomob
Beth,
As usual some great stuff here. In our experience, it is not only what is being monitored but how deep the monitoring services go.
In some cases they may read only headlines and first paragraph and don’t go much deeper. In many cases things are missed. You want to make sure the service provides the length AND the breadth.
As with all monitoring you’re only as good as basic things like search terms, etc. Make sure you are being walked through the best way to determine those important things as well.
Jon
This is such a great discussion. I have enjoyed reading it and it says a lot that we are at this point of conversation. A year ago if you spoke of things like social metrics people would look at you like you had two heads! So we have come a long way in a short time.
I would like to add that while most of the technology out there is really good, you need to couple it with the human factor. You must weed through search results to make sure what the end user receives is accurate data. Yes you can use trial and error when setting up keywords, etc., however some unwanted posts will still come through. If the client is large enough, this could skew the data.
We use account managers to weed out irreverent posts for our clients so that when results are sent they can be sure they are getting exactly what they need.
Beth,
I just wanted to leave a quick comment on the great summary of questions and comments. Interest in the SMM category is so vibrant and dynamic and it’s particularly exciting to be monitoring the discourse that evolves from posts like yours because part of understanding what makes vendors relevant is recognizing the things that matter most to the people using the tools and services.
Thanks for advancing the discussion.
Joseph
@RepuTrack
Thanks everyone for adding more depth to the list!
Marcel, I won’t be at SXSW this year — Hope you have a great time!
Beth,
Incredibly useful article that everyone should read. There’s not a lot that I would add to that list, other than multi-lingual support (this is key to our large multinational enterprise clients, as we find). Also, to ensure that the tool doesn’t become shelfware, it has to have an easy to use UI, and a great first-user experience. Support is critical too – we offer 24×5 support and have engineers who build very complex topics for our largest clients.
In my opinion one of the biggest trends in the monitoring industry that will continue throughout 2010 and beyond, is the engagement piece. Monitoring is great, and you absolutely should be working with someone who can give you relevant data from the sources that are relevant to your brand. But taking it a step further, you must be able to do something about it. So as us, SMM vendor, keep improving our platforms, powerful engagement tools will become more and more important and prevalent.
Again, love the post!
- Maria Ogneva
Biz360
@themaria @biz360
Hi Beth,
So sorry I’m showing up to the party late, but I just wanted to say what a great article to read. The social media monitoring market is diversifying into differenct segments and as such offer different services. These are great questions to be asked when looking for a professional tool to monitor for you, because if you are going to hand over the cash to have it done for you, it should be done well.
I would also add to ask if there are any options available specifically for your sector?
Can the index be customized to include/exclude specific sites or types of sites?
What can be done in case of a crisis (is crisis monitoring offered)?
How is sentiment analyzed? Only at article level or at tag level?
Thanks for the great article.
Best, Michelle @Synthesio
[...] Considering a Social Monitoring Investment? (MarketingProfs) [...]
Hi Beth,
Great list you have there. Thought you could also add:
1) how do you ensure all the sites required are covered and the search is not solely through RSS feeds/google alerts (which any company can easily set up for themselves)
2) what kind of reports/insights can you derive from the data – we all suffer from data overload, its best to have professionals sieve out the most actionable insights from all the data.
3) do you provide coverage across multiple languages.
At this point, allow me to share that Brandtology builds custom crawlers for each forum/blog/review/micro-blog that needs to be monitored, such that deep search is possible and data is extracted is a timely manner.
With more than 100 Social Media Specialists in 10 locations around the world, we are also able to verify and enhance our automated machine analysis in more than 9 different languages. This ensures very high accuracy and relevancy of the analysis reports provided to our clients who do not have to waste a moment sieving through irrelevant data.
If you would like to find out more about what we do and how we do it, do drop me a mail at ashley.lim[at]brandtology[dot]com.
Ashley Lim
Social Media Consultant
Brandtology
[...] they cover social and traditional media)? For other questions to ask of your SMM software visit the MarketingProfs [...]
Beth,
This article is filled with meaningful tips! With such a growing list of social media monitoring solutions out there it can be overwhelming for organizations and individuals to get started. I say figure out what you want to track, ask questions and be sure you get current social media intelligence.
Learning how to use social media monitoring shouldn’t be difficult; it should empower. Let’s keep this discussion on social media monitoring moving forward: )
Thanks Beth!
Coretta Jackson, MBA
@CorettaJackson
@GetCurrent
**Launching soon… Current, social media intelligence for organizations, professionals & businesses