Tagged: social media monitoring

Social media – when the listening has to stop

One of the mantras of social media is the need to listen.  Listen to your customers, consumers, to conversations, etc. etc.  etc.  However, I am now starting to see organisations caught in a listening trap.  These organisations have, sensibly enough, been monitoring social media for some time and have now reached the point where they are asking “where next with our monitoring?”  They are looking to get ever more precise measures, crunch ever greater amounts of data, analyse the influence of the sources they identify in greater depth, develop better quantitative analysis.  To them this seems both possible and necessary because the social media space is vast and growing, with so much data within it, so many opportunities for number crunching.

However, there is a problem.  This is a road with no ending.  Continue reading

Thoughts for Neville re #msm09 panel

Neville,

Not at the conference, but here are some thoughts for your panel.

1. I haven’t found a single paid-for black box monitoring solution that really helps devise and then run a social media strategy.  They are not real-time enough and they are focused on monitoring digital places rather than digital spaces. http://tinyurl.com/lg7cv4

2. You can only take monitoring so far until you reach the point where you have to stop spectating and start participating – start creating the environment you then need to monitor.

3. You don’t need to monitor everything (like we used to monitor media coverage) – its a case of identifying and keeping you eye on the 3 or 4 areas of social media space (i.e. conversations) that are relevant to your business.   Organisations which have lots of customers often think they need to have lots of conversations – they don’t.  Listen to your customers and you will find there are only 4 conversations they want to have with you. http://tinyurl.com/yfu9f24

What social media monitoring and the English Channel have in common

What do social media monitoring and the English Channel have in common?

Answer: if you understand how you sail a ship up a busy sea-lane, like the English Channel, you will understand how to do social media monitoring.

As I have previously posted, there are basically two approaches / camps within social media monitoring.  First is the data capture approach that uses proprietary paid-for tools to crunch all the data and churn out charts and graphs and measure sentiment etc.  Second is the real-time approach based on constructing a monitoring panel that monitors activity in the relevant conversation spaces as it happens.  I sit very firmly in the latter camp, not because the analysis tools don’t work – they have their uses – but because they are nowhere nearly as important or useful a tool to an organisation that wishes to design and manage a social media campaign. Continue reading

Is much of social media monitoring snake oil – or have I missed something?

Picture2I have recently had reason to focus on the area of monitoring of social media which has involved looking once more at the whole range of black box monitoring solutions that are out there.  This has caused me deep feelings of confusion and uncertainty.

The reason is this: when I do monitoring for a client, or advise a client on how to do monitoring, this is what I do.  Continue reading