BrandSavant

Gaining Insight From Social Media Data

Is Social Media Monitoring Worth The Trouble?

by Tom Webster on July 14, 2010

Karl Havard posted a provocative article this week on Econsultancy entitled “Social Media Monitoring: Time To Say ‘Sod It’?” (for my non-Anglophile friends, “sod it” is a nicer way of saying “F@%k it.” Just so you know.) His contention: as more and more people join the social web, the task of monitoring and responding will become more and more onerous, and ultimately unscalable. After all, how many conversations can you possibly have at once? At what point does responding to “everything” become unsustainable?

I can’t speak to the potential tactical burdens of the growth of the social web, but my suspicion is that as more and more middle-of-the-bell curve folks join in online conversations, the ratio of people talking about brands will diminish, not increase, and the corresponding burden on a company’s customer service/social response teams will not grow linearly, but begin to taper off. Besides, the best way to conserve resources on the reputation management/customer service side of things is not to stop listening, it’s to make better stuff, right?

In any case, I don’t think companies today have any obligation to listen and react to every conversation online, let alone in a future where everyone who is going to be on the social boat is all aboard. Social media monitoring does, however, have to prove its worth beyond mere tactical interaction in order to evolve and become more central to the theory of the firm. In order to do that, social media monitoring has to graduate from “fire-fighting” app to a reliable source for consumer insights. Today, monitoring enables companies to find and respond to people having issues with the widgets they sell; tomorrow, it will enable companies to design better widgets.

The only way that social media monitoring can make this leap is if companies can trust the data they see as representative and reflective of reality. That’s a little dicey today – the high percentage of Twitterers having brand conversations is less indicative of the actual prevalence of those conversations online than it is the size of Twitter’s fishbowl. When you don’t know who isn’t on the social web (and who isn’t having brand conversations), you can’t model non-response bias. When you can’t model that, then you can’t reach any projectable conclusions from what you do hear on the social web. Do the 5-6 people piling on your brand on a message board speak for 500? 50,000? Just themselves?

When more and more people join the social web and, perhaps, engage in brand conversations, then yes, the burden of listening to each and every conversation will increase. But sampling those conversations, which is what a competent CMO or market research analyst would do, will get more reliable and representative. The more “regular” people chatting about brands online, the more representative a sampling of those conversations will be – and the more important social media monitoring will become as it graduates to genuine social media research.

So, to sum up, more is not worse. More is better. And the more people participate in the social web, the more important it will be to have ears to listen. The key is to be able to see the forest, and not just the trees. Or the sod.

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  • http://www.vongehrconsulting.com Erroin Martin

    Tom,

    I agree with you that a business cannot monitor everything or respond to everything as well. It is the latter that companies look at when it comes to managing their brand presence on social media. Hence the firefighting approach.

    Truly insightful companies will monitor areas of interest to their campaigns and overall strategy. They will look to lead the conversation directly or indirectly by creating brand personas in the different social media platforms. This will attract participants in the conversation and make monitoring less onerous.

    Great post!

    @Erroin

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  • http://www.trackur.com Andy Beal

    Thanks for a more balanced approach to the Econsultancy post.

    I think that social media monitoring should be looked at based on the conversations going on about your company. If you’re a dairy farmer, then you probably don’t even need Google Alerts. If you’re Toyota or BP, then you need social media monitoring more than you know it! ;-)

    Andy

  • http://www.linkedin.com/in/foodsho Mark Moreno

    I am not a social media expert so I am offering my opinion or as I like to say my “pebble in the pond” or in this case “pebble in the ocean”. My point is that I am not commenting to create a “ripple” or gain 8 million followers on my Twitter. Having said that here is my feather on the scale:

    No one really knows exactly what social media is or exactly what it does but there seems to be no shortage of people telling us how it will or will not change the world. It is however changing the way that consumers interact with each other and what they say to each others about products, services, brands, etc. is important, especially to them (the consumer).

    Attempting to use a ton of subjective comments, “likes” “dislikes” etc. is probably futile, I think. What is important is “sentiment”, gauging consumer sentiment towards a brand is incredibly important. Throw out all of the “dot’com dot.bomb” metrics they are in my opinion not relevant anywhere outside of the boardroom of many companies. There seems to be an endless array of people and services that claim that everything about consumers has to be graphed, metriced, and touted as the reason for being.

    Brands need to engage their consumers and they have to listen to them. As for “Social Media Monitoring” it is an abused and over abused “buzzterm”. As for listening brands do need a way to gauge sentiment and acknowledge their customers. They cannot send a tweet or message to everyone comment everytime. If they are not responding to someone they are missing one of the biggest benefits of social media. Brands need to take their customers temperature and a sentiment capture device is a great enabler.

    Thank you for letting me rant, don’t hate me, hate the game!

  • Tom Webster

    BP is kind of an extinction-level event, though–I wonder what social media monitoring could even do for them at this point. What would make for an interesting study for a reputation-management expert like you, Andy, would be the delta between the damage caused to companies like Toyota and BP by traditional media alone, and the additional, non-redundant reputation damage realized through negative social media mentions. The greater that delta, the greater the need, I suppose.

  • Tom Webster

    Rant away, Mark. My 8 million Twitter followers Mother won’t mind.

  • Allie Osmar

    I’m glad you mentioned sampling. I work with a few brands that see 50,000+ posts per month and, to your point, sampling is the only way to get a true handle on all of those conversations. It’s that and selective listening – figuring out what potential issues/keywords to focus on and watching overall trends for any unexpected events.

  • http://www.netsprinter.com Lyena Solomon

    For big businesses monitoring social media could be quite expensive and time-consuming. However, by demonstrating that they care, they improve brand trust, relationships with customers, word of mouth and drive referrals. All that will ultimately increase revenue.

    I made a comment on Twitter about my Firefox crashing. Got a message from Firefox folks. I already like Firefox, use it all the time and promote it. Now I like it a little more and will promote it a little more. Because my silly comment seemed serious enough for Firefox social media team to care and respond.

    For small businesses, monitoring social media is a gold mine. Instead of spending money on user surveys, you can spend a month on social media with clear goals and you’ll get incredible insights on what you can do better, what your potential customers really want, what your competition is not doing, etc.

    The critical word here is “focus”. Everybody knows, you can drown in data. Set of with a goal – you will know what to measure and monitor. The following month, set a different goal, monitor and measure something else. Eventually, you’ll achieve perfection.

    @lyena

  • http://buhlerworks.com Joe Buhler

    Excellent contribution to a rational conversation about the social web and how it affects people and in turn business. To me it seems the need for following the conversation about a brand is as necessary for an organization as it was – and often still is – to conduct research into what customers, and non-customers think about it. This used to be a rather expensive and time consuming process with focus groups and studies etc. In today’s connected world of the social web a lot of valuable insight can be gleaned by using monitoring tools that can be deployed on a constant basis. I agree that to make this collected data even more valuable it is actually a good thing for more people to be involved in the ongoing conversation, as opposed to only the geekerati and early adopters.
    We’re still in the early stages of all this and more organizations will no doubt become adept at following the conversation and make decisions based on it that will ultimately improve their performance and in turn bottom line.

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