Interestingly, social media holds power in that sense because of the unfiltered nature of the dialogue (given that most people who respond to surveys skew responses because of how conscious they are of the evaluation).

But I suppose my bigger question is whether the segment-test-develop model really does work? I’m not an advertising person so I can’t really speak to it, and I’m legitimately asking. Is the model sound but the execution sometimes flawed? And does/can this translate to a social media channel seamlessly? I have to believe that there are differences in the way we consume via social media that would make it work differently, but perhaps that assumption is false.

anyway. Great food for thought here…I’m still chewing.

A

Kidding aside, the exception/condition you note at the beginning of your thoughtful comment may be a non-trivial exception. If things work differently, then we should know that. And if things work the same, well, that just makes social media monitoring even more powerful.

In many respects, social media monitoring is still in its infancy despite the attention it is receiving and the number of players in the market.

As the social media technology evolves and improves, individuals and companies will be able to use and leverage it in different ways to gain the intelligence, insight and data that meets their strategic and tactical needs.

In an ideal world, social media monitoring will continue to be accessible by giving users user-friendly and intuitive interfaces, which will make it easier to harness the technology and the millions of conversations taking place.

Thanks for the interesting thoughts.

Mark

Mark Evans
Sysomos Inc.
@sysomos

You know I love when you go places like this. Thanks for opening an interesting discussion.

So many folks are clamoring for “predictive” modeling in social media analysis, which is a dicey issue, isn’t it? So much of that can be subjective, and moreover at the mercy of anecdotal data at best to try and predict some kind of abstract future of what will be the next platform, what offers will stick, or how people will consume media five years from now.

But this interests me far more, because what would also be part of this is the ability to start diagnosing what actions, content, or combination of initiatives help bring people from one “stage” of awareness to another. I’ve no idea how consistent it would be from business to business, but it would be interesting to see if for example the aware-but-negative crowd responds better to email with specific product related information, or to blog content that’s more broad in focus and conversation.

The trick, as you point out, is that there are many layers of analysis needed here – from what people are saying to why they’re saying to drawing causal conclusions between certain actions (vs. just correlating trends). But this is really the holy grail of understanding social media through whatever lens: the behaviors and intents that lay underneath the actions.

As businesses, if we can get closer to understanding motivation and use of social media by individuals (versus always looking at it from how we can create utility as a business communication medium), I think we’d be much closer to something of long-term, groundbreaking value indeed.

Thanks for getting my gears turning. I’ve shared with our team internally, too, in hopes that we can all continue to discuss.

Best,
Amber Naslund
Radian6