Borasky Research Journal Google+ Page Richard Stacy asks, “Is much of social media monitoring snake oil – or have I missed something?” In his blog post, Stacy first describes how he sets up social media monitoring for a client, using his expertise in available tools and knowledge of the client’s business environment. He then goes on to say, “However, out there is a huge industry selling incredibly impressive black boxes that reel off reams of charts and data and figures and tracking, with sentiment analysis and conversation mining (conversation mining?) and all sorts of other wizardry.”
Stacy concludes with, “But there again – it appears to be big business. People are buying these remote sensing and analysis products. Is it just snake oil and are the purveyors of such trading (albeit unwittingly) on ignorance? Or have I missed something?” In my opinion, Stacy’s custom approach is clearly the way to go for a small business, assuming they can afford to hire a consultant like Stacy and have the staff and management commitment to keep the monitoring going.
But for a large business, with millions of customers and prospects, thousands of employees, terabytes of customer data and complex web presences, there’s simply no way the Stacy approach can scale. First of all, the free tools are difficult to work with. They require human intervention and constant tweaking. And in some cases, you need a developer who understands an application programming interface (API).
Second, the whole point of social media monitoring is to acquire and exploit clean and valid data about customers and prospects and how they interact with your products or services. You simply cannot build a such a clean database by hand – without high-powered statistical methods that require expertise in quantitative marketing and significant storage and computational hardware capacity.
But the real reason why the advanced monitoring and analytical tools are vital to large businesses is integration. What Stacy does by hand for a small business is integration. With the advanced tools, it’s possible to tie in-house customer and CRM data with sentiment, presence in the media, geographic and demographic data. And an integrated tool answers one other vital question: “How does the marketplace perceive your competition?” And it’s possible to leverage a small investment in software, hardware and analytical staff into a significant competitive advantage. You just can’t do that by hand.
So my answer to the question, “Is much of social media monitoring snake oil?” is, “Hell, No!” It’s a growing business for a good reason – it creates value by enabling businesses to read the “digital body language” of customers and prospects, and provides a competitive advantage at a vastly lower cost than other approaches.
RT @tweetmeme Is Much of Social Media Monitoring Snake Oil? Hell, No! http://ow.ly/1n8rDf
I’ve been following this conversation since it started on the Social Media Today post, and carried over to here. Social Media Monitoring is an area I’ve spent a considerable amount of time on, and my sense is that the signal here is being lost in the noise (chatter) about this topic. Remember, these fancy black boxes are just TOOLS, that is all.
Tools can either be as useful or as useless as the operator wants them to be. Automation by itself cannot provide any company with the silver bullet answer of how to better understand customers. Humans, without tools, cannot manually do this in an efficient and effective manner (it doesn’t scale). That is why the truly successful companies, regardless of size, take a hybrid approach.
Combining best of breed tools with strong analysis and judgement skills puts companies in the best position to adequately sift through the mountains of data that the digital/social web produces, while not sacrificing quality, and the human understanding that is needed to actually derive valuable, relevant insights from the raw data. These insights are the “gold” that companies seek. Actionable outcomes can be attached to these insights, which inform and drive strategy & tactics to improve products, services, and customer experiences.
I think SMM is a critical exercise for any size company, but agree the space is moving at light speed with constant changes. In addition, these solutions are marketed in a oversimplified manner, which sets false expectations for outcomes and investment needed to realize value.
With the proper expectations, strategy and resources, SMM is a must have. Some call it conversation mining, I liken it to Brand Radar. Who wants to fly without it?
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Great post. A good look at the differences between calculating and interpreting data collected through social media, and then actually applying that information to your consumers’ benefit (and in turn your organization’s).
Regardless of an operation’s size, people are required to analyze social media metrics to continue engaging with constituents of interest. With those that can afford upscale analytics software and hardware — and with Web 3.0 furthering the process of working “with the rapidly increasing source in information (@Steve Dodd)” I’m eager to see how social media careers evolve, especially with larger organizations able to afford the latest advancements in monitoring this consumer/participant-driven information.
There is so much more coming in this market that is driven by escalating consumer use. Like it or not, automation is coming faster than most understand. But, to a great extent people are still needed to evaluate and act on results. Web 3.0 i coming fast and will significant increase people’s ability to work with the rapidly increasing source in information. And, if people keep relying on “Free” tools, they’ll lose out on this advanced evolution. Don’t ever, ever forget, nothing is free.
Some chose to waste a lot of time doing things that can easily be automated. In time, it’s unlikely they’ll survive because they’ll spend more time building the car than going somewhere.
Yea it works!
At Dell it worked, because we had people using the monitoring tools and engaging with our online public.
The only way I see a company fail in this space is if they turn on monitoring and never read the insights, take action, or adapt their business from the web discussions.
It would be interesting to take a big company that has a highly effective social media presence (Dell being the example that springs to mind) and see what they do. It wouldn’t surprise me if they relied primarily on the hand-driven approach.
I can see the point about integration with other analysis tools, but the point of all analysis always has to be “what’s the point”? For conventional mass media marketing you needed lots of data and analysis because the costs and therefore potential wastage of this type of communication was huge. To operate in the social media space you don’t need this type of analysis or precision. It is easy to get an effective read of the digital body language of your customer or prospects using the free tools – and what’s more, these tools naturally lead you to the place of action – actually responding or doing something specific. These broad spectrum analysis tools, no matter how detailed and precise they can become, are never precise or specific enough to help generate the type of communication that works within the many-to-many world of the connected consumer.
Ugh, I liked! So clear and positively.
Nadine