Our Social Times has moved!

Luke Brynley-Jones and Our Social Times, the social media consultancy and events company, can now be found at OurSocialTimes.com.

Monitoring Social Media 09 - 17th November, London

Back in August an email conversation I had with Jenny Zeszut of Scoutlabs spawned the idea of a UK-based social media monitoring event. Well, now we have a date, a venue and a roster of first class speakers. You can find out more at www.monitoring-social-media.com. Incidentally - I'm just about to upgrade this blog to WordPress. I'll be found at OurSocialTimes.com from tomorrow. See you there!

Companies Failing to Measure ROI of Social Media Campaigns

A social media report claims that the vast majority of companies are still not adequately measuring the success of their social media campaigns. The MarketingProfs study of 338 companies found that "21% of marketers say they are now adequately measuring the impact of social-media campaigns in terms of tangible results", which also means 79% aren't.

This is pretty typical for an area of marketing innovation, but is actually rather shoddy for one in which data is so easily available. I have a list of over 80 social media monitoring companies (many of which are free or easily affordable to most companies), so there really is no excuse not to be tracking and analysing the results of social media engagement. Shame on you failing companies!

Some other interesting stats from the report were:

• 30% of the respondents had "dedicated resources" for monitoring social media
• 25% selected "don't know what to measure".
• 20% selected "social media measurement isn't primarily about ROI"
• Nearly six in ten respondents (58%) say monitoring is "important" to their companies.
• 31% say it is "somewhat important"
• Most companies monitor for "reputation management" or "prospecting"
  

What's Wrong With Social Media Monitoring Services?

I've been following an interesting debate over on No Man's Blog about whether social media monitoring services are all their cracked up to be. In the original post Asi Sharabi launches a visceral assault on social media monitoring services, citing Radian6, BuzzMetrics, BrandWatch and Techrigy, among his targets. His key accusations are:

1. The technology is fairly stupid.
2. The services produce unreliable data.
3. Sentiment analysis is flawed.
4. The don't offer regional-specific data.
5. Influence analysis is flawed.
6. Visualisation tools are misleading (due to data).
7. The process is time consuming.
8. The services are expensive and not value for money.

The discussion has generally flowed with Asi's criticisms. Many of the commentors, including staff and founders from several leading SMM service providers, concede that the industry is still relatively new, that it's grappling with difficult issues: how to gather filter data from the masses of spam and nonsense on the web; how to gauge sentiment accurately without using expensive humans in real-time; working out what "influence" means in different contexts; plus the normal troublesome issues web services have - like getting the usability, price and customer support right.

Having collated the data within this post though, identified the influencers and gauged the overall sentiment - there's a definite feeling that social media monitoring services to date have been oversold. I've certainly seen promises of "80% accuracy for sentiment detection" and "we'll identify the most influential people in your industry". Claims which, to anyone lacking a world-weary bullshit detector, must seem fantastic. I can see hard-pressed PR Managers around the globe signing off on $1000/month just to bathe in the warm glow of that promise.

Anyway, Justin Kirstner of WebTrends has just boldly struck back for the social media monitoring services, highlighting the novelty of in industry in which many services are still on version 1.0 and criticising Asi as an "armchair critic" an a Johnny-come-lately to the discussion. I can see this one going into extra time. Well worth a read through the comments if you've got a spare 15 mins.

P.s An Invitation: If you'd like to take part in a real-life debate about social media monitoring services, meet the vendors and hear case studies, I'm running a conference in London late in autumn 09. I'll be publicising this in Sept, but you can email me for more info.

lbrynleyjones (at) gmail.com

Scoutlabs Make Social Media Monitoring A Bit Easier

Scoutlabs have added a clever new feature called Quotes. Not content with simply showing you what bloggers, Twitterers, forum and social networks users are saying about you or your brand, Scoutlabs now filter these out into a series of customer feedback in-trays depending on the sentiment of the comment.

For example, if someone suggested that "Gordon Brown really needs a makeover", the PM would duly have that filtered into a positive feedback box. These pre-configured in-trays cover a range of types of comment:

• Love: Raves for the product or brand
• Hate: Rants by unhappy customers
• Wish: What customers WISH your company would do, add, change, improve
• Feature requests and ideas
• Compare: Ways that your brand is being considered alongside others.
• Who’s better than who? What are customers switching to when the abandon you?
• Recommend: When people highly recommend you, what do they say? What’s the favorite thing? What do they recommend you do differently?
• Issues: What problems are customers having with you? What concerns are lingering?
• Caveat: Your brand advocates LOVE your product BUT…(or however…)

And the nice thing is: it's automated. You may recall from my review of Scoutlabs back in March that they have opted for automated sentiment detection, while other services (see my review of Radian6 here) prefer human intervention. Jenny Zeszut, CEO of Scoutlabs, commented that automation is almost as accurate (to within 10%), and it's evidently less work for busy marketing and PR execs.

I sense a further blog post coming in which we put these two sentiment detection methods to the test.

Report Shows: Large Companies Profit from Social Media

Just back from a brief holiday and spotted this useful report ranking the social media engagement of major companies. To my mind there are three interesting points to take from it.

Firstly, there is a clear correlation between social media engagement and financial growth. This isn't to say that social media is producing direct profits, but suggests that more socially switched-on companies may be benefiting from the goodwill and word-of-mouth marketing that social media enables.

Secondly, that companies can be categorised according to how they are engaging in social media. These categories are pretty familiar to anyone versed in social engagement theory, but still, it's interesting to work out which one your company might be:

• Mavens: engaged in seven or more channels and have an above-average engagement score. Examples: Dell, Starbucks
• Butterflies: engaged in seven or more channels but have lower than average engagement scores. Examples: American Express, Hyundai
• Selectives: engaged in six or fewer channels and have higher than average engagement scores. Examples: H&M and Philips
• Wallflowers: engaged in six or fewer channels and have below-average engagement scores. Examples: McDonalds and BP

Lastly, this study shows a very interesting (and possibly new) insight into how companies seem to reach a 'tipping point' in their use of social media. While they only use a few tools - e.g. a blog and Facebook - their engagement levels are low. When they increase the range of social media tools they use, however, the depth of their engagement (crudely, how often they post) also increases. It's as if they suddenly switch on to this new world of customer engagement and start to invest resources into it.

I suspect this point is reached when posting and responding to comments, Tweets etc. shifts from being something done in someone's spare time, to a formal responsability or the agreed role of a team or department. Whatever the cause, it's encouraging to see reports like this. The Rank Yourself tool is pretty lame, but I can't fault the dedication of reviewing 100 top companies. Bravo!

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