5 Reasons Why Social Media Monitoring Urgently Needs Human Intervention

There is much controversy over social media monitoring – sentiment accuracy, influence scores, keyword vs. bullion logic, demographics and geographics accuracy and the list goes on.   All these topics are very important criteria when making analysis using social media data.  One thing that often gets over looked is the relevancy and accuracy of the data. 

Getting accurate and relevant data using a social media monitoring tool is not easy, to say the least.  There are many ways to improve the accuracy of the data including refining keywords, applying exclusions for name confusion, weeding out irrelevant sites and spam etc.  Also applying industry scoring terms increases the accuracy of the data as well.  However even with all these mechanisms social media data is still weighed down by a lot of other noise.  

Improving the accuracy (via automation) of your social media monitoring is simply not good enough. 

Without human eyes to either validate mentions or spot check the data the accuracy rate will never be even close to 100%. 

Here are 5 reasons why Social Media Monitoring data needs human intervention:

1. RISK! - Human validation should be applied to look for any large risks against an organization.  Risks can come in the form of employee disclosing confidential documents, protesters planning a dangerous event near one of your locations or even a threat to an executive.  Missing these needles in the haystack can have huge re-percussions and financial impact. Obviously marketing isn’t going to be responsible for this type of monitoring, but the Security/Risk Department sure should be!
2. Spotting Trends - The speed at which social media storms can travel means that humans must spot trends quickly. As far as we have come with social media automation, spotting trends and classifying key drivers requires human intervention.
3. Engagement Opportunities - The argument can be made that some organizations are just too big to have human analysis on ALL social mentions.  I agree with this, checking 100% of the mentions for a company like McDonalds could cost hundreds of millions of dollars.  McDonald’s sees somewhere in the name of 2.5 million mentions per month.  However McDonald does an excellent job of triaging mentions and responding when appropriate.  A company of that size can’t possibly say “Thank You” or “Sorry” to every mention, but some do require a response to prevent issues from escalating. 
4. Size - Small companies are on the opposite spectrum, some of the small banks or credit unions we monitor using our SMART tool can sometimes only see a handful of social mentions a day.  No company should be ignoring that volume of discussion. It can take one in house analyst 10 minutes to review the mentions daily.  Months can go by without any issues needing to be addressed, but it only takes one mention for something to escalate to a much bigger deal if it goes unnoticed.
5. Turning insight into Actions – Back in the day marketers had to call focus groups together in order to get feedback on products and services.  There are of course many criticisms of this type of research, not to mentions it is very costly.  Social media discussions are free mostly un-biased opinions.  Marketers can use root cause analysis to protect their reputation, make important decisions about product improvements and generate new business.

Are you monitoring social media?  If so do you use a human validation service to complement it?