FreshNetworks Blog

This is our first post from the Social Media Monitoring – 2010 review series. In it we’ll cover the basics of social media monitoring.

Background

Social media tools make it possible for people to have conversations online. The uptake in conversations, comments and reviews has been explosive and the importance of these conversations is growing by the day. Among many other things, people are discussing brands, describing their purchase intentions and asking for assistance in making buying decisions or product support.

The opportunity for organisations is clear. They can now listen-in on the conversations of their customers, potential customers and other stakeholders in a way that was previously impossible. Through social media monitoring it is possible to gain insights from the conversations people are having online every day and to make improvements to products, customer service and marketing as a result.

Real-world ethnography has been around for a while – the process of analysing the context in which people act, usually researched by observing subjects in their natural habitat. It can teach us a lot about behaviour and influencing factors, however it is expensive and subject to The Observer’s Paradox (see also Schrödinger’s Cat).

Social media monitoring brings observational research to a mass audience. By tracking what is said in forums, on Twitter and in other social networks, brands can gain customer insight. But beyond getting geeky researcher’s excited, it can also offer very practical benefits to organisations. Customer service teams can listen out for customer issues online and then and resolve them. Competitor Intelligence departments can find out what customers are saying about competitors’ products. PR Managers can get early warning of pending PR disasters before they hit main-stream media and most of all, by listening first, companies can be better prepared to join online conversations and become social.

Social media monitoring clearly has tangible business benefits and as a result it’s a hot topic. Furthermore, the power and importance of what people are writing online is increasing. The reach an influential blogger can have is extraordinary. And according to Neilsen, consumer recommendations have now become the most powerful form of advertising (78% of people trust customer reviews). As a result companies need to monitor word-of-mouth more than ever.

Using search engines to monitor online conversations

Many online conversations can be accessed with ease and for free using Google or other search engines. Simply using your brand name as a search term, or using keywords that are associated with your brand (eg, for Starbucks you could search for “Starbucks” or “whole bean coffee”) you can find conversations that are related to your brand. Taking that process a step further you can set up Google Alerts so that you get an email when someone mentions your keywords.

However, if you search in this way you’ll probably end up with hundreds of thousands of returned results and a limited number of ways to analyse the data further. You will also get a mixture of professional and user generated content. It is possible to use some free buzz tracking tools to focus on certain areas. For example Omgili and Board Tracker are great ways to search forums. But until Google enters the social media monitoring market, the best way for enterprises to track social media is by using a paid-for tool.

The benefits of using social media monitoring tools

Social media monitoring tools deal with the two problems of searching and analysing the online conversation. The tools use similar web crawling technology to search engines in the way that they read online conversations. However, unlike search engines, the tools clean, de-duplicate and categorise the conversations and then store them in a database.  As our report and future posts will show, some tools do these things better than others.

Social media monitoring tools also allow you to enter search terms into the database so that you can customise the way you view the results. The tools count the conversations that contain your search terms and provide you with the ability to display this information in graphs and charts.  Most tools also allow you to divide by location or media type (eg, Twitter or blogs) and at the cutting edge, some social media monitoring tools provide workflow management process that can help you disseminate conversations within your organisation, others are starting to combine buzz tracking with CRM in a bid to create single-customer-view Social CRM. And there are some tools that allow you to respond to conversations across the web from a single dashboard.

One key feature that marketeers have been most keen on is sentiment analysis.

What is sentiment?

Sentiment is a thought, view, or attitude that is often based more on emotion than reason. In the context of social media monitoring, it is the concept of deciding whether a specific online conversation is positive or negative. This is really useful in helping you determine the themes and topics that are driving both good and bad conversations about your brand.

Sentiment can also allow you to track the overall impact of marketing campaigns or news about your brand. We suspect the main reason people have latched onto sentiment is because it gives the impression that the plethora of web conversations can be summarised in a single number. Businesses love to track numbers and sentiment is often the KPI of choice for social media.

This is dangerous. Sentiment is more nuanced than a single number and using an automated tool to assess how people feel puts too much faith in the today’s software. We don’t believe that the tools on the market have nailed sentiment analysis yet. The tools can be extremely valuable, but it is important to understand their limitations as it is to understand their capabilities.

One piece of advice - it’s not about the bike

The most important thing to bear in mind when choosing a social media monitoring tool is that ongoing human interaction and interpretation are essential to get real value. If there is one mistake that companies are making it’s that they buy into a dashboard expecting insights on a plate. Months later they look back and wonder why the dashboard hasn’t changed their business.

Buzz tracking opens up opportunities for insight, but it is worthless without sufficient people resource and internal processes to act on information.

I am biased. My background is research (FreshMinds, our sister firm, has been twice named UK Research Agency of the Year by the Market Research Society) and we’re not selling a tool. Rather we help companies select the right tool and help them get value out of it on an ongoing basis. But I think you’ll find most of the software vendors will concur that their happiest clients are the ones who have properly resourced the listening effort and invested sufficient time in interpretation, dissemination and action. After all, what’s the point in listening if you never act on what you hear?

The next blog post in our series will be about setting up each of the leading tools to get the most out of them.

Social media monitoring breakfast seminar

We’re also holding a free social media monitoring breakfast seminar on 15th April in London, where we’ll be presenting the findings of our report, as well as giving practical tips and advice about social media monitoring and the best way to analyse results. You can register for the event by clicking on the button below:

Read the other posts from our social media monitoring review 2010.

Many people will have woken up this morning to another change to the Facebook user interface. You can read more about the redesign over on Mashable, but in summary the social network has:

• Improved its use of the main panel across the site, but especially for displaying photos. These are now displayed larger and more prominently
• Made messaging easier – taking it from being on a separate page to being a drop-down on any page. Giving the user immediate and convenient access to their inbox
• Put all notifications in one place in the top navigation – messages, updates and alerts now all show together in the top navigation
• Made the search box much more prominent

This last change is, perhaps, the most significant. It is much more than just moving and making the search box larger. It shows the importance of search to Facebook, and indeed to all social networks.

Why search is important in social networks

Social networks and online communities generate a lot of content. In online communities, people are there because they share similar interests, experiences or concerns. They are connected by content and so this content tends to be focused on a set of topics, subjects or questions of interest. In social networks, people are there because they are connected to each other because they know each other, have worked at or been to the same place, live near each other or have some other connection other than just the content. In these places, content will be about a range of disparate subjects, discussed by different people at different times and for different reasons.

The approach to findability in these two environments differs. In online communities search is important, but of equal importance is the way you structure the site, and the way you use taxonomies to arrange and sort content. In an online community for people interested in organic food, for example, you might organise your content so that all your recipes are together, and so that you can easily find all content about sweet potatoes. In a social network it is less easy to organise and then find all the content in this way. So it is less about structure and taxonomies and more about very good search.

Facebook is a great example of a social network where good search would make a huge difference to how much use it can make of, and how much value it can get from, all the content added to it every day. The company’s own statistics claim that 3.5 billion pieces of content are added to the social network every day. If I want to find all the content about, for example, one topic or issue it is currently very difficult for me to do so. Search should be the answer to this. If I search for ‘Holborn’, I want to find events in that area of London, public conversations about it, photos with that place in the description, pages talking abotu Holborn and so forth. Maximising the benefit of all this content will make a huge difference in the way people use the site and the way Facebook can use this content.

Facebook’s more prominent search box is much more than just a design change. It reflects the absolute importance of search in social networks. They are different to online communities where structure and taxonomies can help people to find content across the site. Facebook is huge, but to many of us feels very small. We mainly access content through feeds, messages and notifications. Training us as users to make search an integral part of our Facebook experience will make it a much bigger and more useful tool for us all.

Both not-for-profit and membership organisations rely on their members.  There’s just no getting away from that fact. And in order to increase their membership base both nfp and membership organisations need to interact with the public to gain support.

Several charities have already turned to social media as a way of engaging people. A  recent article from Third Sector reported that charities are using blogs, forums and other social media tools to highlight their key aims and encourage word-of-mouth . Large charities like Cancer Research, Amnesty International and ActionAid are all using social media, in particular, blogging, to increase their online presence. But are they using social media to actively strengthen their membership base or is it just another communication tool?

And what about membership organisations? Membership organisations are traditionally viewed as a source of specialist information and advice. They also provide an arena for networking with people who have a similar interest, profession or background.  Today, however,  many of these services are offered elsewhere for free. Search engines give people the ability to look up detailed information on the web.  Social networking tools like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, allow people to reach out and communicate with people “like them”, giving them the opportunity to seek advice and to interact with each other without the need of a third party.

So as more and more people use social media tools to interact and connect with like-minded people, membership organisations need to develop a social media strategy to harness and utilise these connections.  Membership organisations need to join the online conversation. They need to use social media to engage with the people who would be interested in joining their group – and often these people are already talking to eachother, so this should be easy to do.

With this in mind, we’re running a free breakfast seminar for nfp and membership organisations on how to strengthen membership strategy with social media.  The event starts at 8.30am on Thursday 18th February and will include useful tips, advice and case studies from the likes of  Bertie Bosredon, Assistant Director of Services at Breast Cancer Care, and Steve Bridger, Social Media Consultant for nfp and membership organisations.

If you’re an nfp or membership organisation and you want to find out how you can strengthen your membership strategy with social media you can register below for the event.

Strengthen your membership strategy with social media

• Location: FreshNetworks, 229 High Holborn, WC1V 7DA,  London (map)
• Date and time: Thursday February 18, 2010, 08:30-10:30