Social Media Monitoring: Where one size doesn’t fit all!
Posted by Kevin Joy on Mon, Mar 07, 2011
Social media is growing so rapidly, most companies can’t keep pace. This is where social media monitoring tools and listening platforms come in. There are literally hundreds of free and paid-for solutions that help speed up the process of tracking discussions across the Social Web. Most are relatively similar in that they:
1) capture feeds from across sites where the discussions generally take place
2) implement some degree of analysis to filter out irrelevant returns
3) provide diagnostic tools to help with the interpretation of results
Social media “intelligence”, as opposed to “listening”, is the extraction of specific Social Media data that corresponds to the area of interest of the user, enabling them to make more informed, actionable decisions. According to Forrester Research, listening tools serve the primary function of gaining insight from social media, and are the technology that supports the objective of obtaining social media intelligence.
The areas of interest with respect to social media are diverse:
- Marketing may want to know the effectiveness of a new ad campaign;
- Corporate Communications might be concerned with monitoring the discussion following the release of annual results;
- Product Management might be interested in understanding more about the success of new features on their latest models.
The common goal of these groups is to evaluate the “averaging of opinions”, seek direction through the aggregation of results across a spectrum of influencers, and receive input and as much data as possible on the subject.
Conversely, when the interest turns to concerns about risk, an entirely different approach is required. In this context, one can no longer rely on averaging of the crowd’s sentiment, but must uncover and analyze individual issues before they become the average of the crowd’s sentiment. This is the key to dealing with emerging threats. The nature of these risks means that incidents of concern need to be rooted out and addressed wherever they are and as soon as they pop up.
The approach to dealing with risk requires coverage of even the deepest, darkest corners of the internet. Search strategies and analysis of discussion are specifically geared to concerns such as employee disclosure, malicious attacks, and even identity theft. The search needs to go beyond discussions to other early warning indicators, such as the monitoring of newly registered domain names that might signal an impending threat, that become a critical piece of the puzzle. (e.g “xyzcompanysucks.com”).
The below table illustrates different types of uses for social media monitoring and associated vendors:
Dealing with threats such as defamatory discussion, copyright infringement, counterfeiting, defamation, identity theft, inappropriate employee disclosure, and document leakage can be addressed with the specialized tools and services offered by BrandProtect.
In addition to monitoring tools we use sophisticated measures to uncover actionable intelligence, and we provide technical tools and support to eliminate the threats encountered.
In summary, one-size does not fit all in the context of social media monitoring.
The sheer scale of data means that you need to carefully consider your goals and objectives, identify your needs, and then assess your internal resources and expertise; not just in collecting and analyzing data, but more significantly, in determining and executing appropriate response strategies.