Working Three

This year has seen an ever increasing number of companies and organisations experiment with social media. As they embark on what in most cases is a long journey, the need to become more sophisticated about how they approach the social web becomes greater. Of course, there are a number of tools and techniques to help collect and analyse the data. But what should the management team be looking for?

Like most aspects of running a business, rather than focusing on products or prices, it is best to focus on outcomes and objectives. In this article we will explore how social media monitoring works, and discuss what to look for when making choices.

Social media monitoring tools are similar to search engines in that they look through vast quantities of data and serve up relevant results. At a basic level the results show mentions of your company or brand name. There are many free tools that do this simple task well. But to obtain real intelligence, much deeper insights are needed. This is where more sophisticated tools shine. Each one has it’s strengths and weaknesses, so knowing how to ask the right questions becomes very important.

The ‘social web’ consists of social platforms like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, but it also covers blogs, special interest forums, wikis and any website that has an area where people can leave comments. Some of these platforms allow anonymous interaction, others ask for more detailed personal information. Understanding where your market is, is important. A basic search with a good monitoring tool should be able to give you this information quickly.

From this point you can start to dive into the data to obtain more meaningful insights. Basic demographic information – such as age and gender – can help you define segments quickly, and start to define the culture and language of the different groups. Many tools allow you to see how ‘important’ different users are – meaning you can pinpoint the influencers – positive and negative – very quickly, and develop strategies to manage them.

Geo-location information is being shared via smart phones with GPS functionality at an ever increasing rate. This allows you to know where people were when a certain comment was made. If you are looking at your own brand or product category, this can be helpful when thinking about where to focus resources. However, it can be far more powerful when you are monitoring your competitors. Knowing where your competitors are performing poorly can allow you to direct marketing spend to that area, and pick up the ‘low hanging fruit’.

Better social monitoring platforms also have a dictionary you can program, allowing you to apply context or meaning to words and sentences. The phrase ‘fully sick’ may be very negative for one demographic group and very positive for another. Once the meaning is developed, it then becomes reasonably straight forward to understand the sentiment, what people think about your brand, your competitor or anything else you choose to monitor.

In the end, listening to social media is about developing a business intelligence strategy. Your people in your market are having conversations every day. These conversations can provide valuable insights. If you get it right, it can be like running a never ending focus group. But, much like real life, it’s important to know ‘how’ to listen.