The lowdown on social media monitoring

Once upon a time, social media monitoring was a niche activity, often undertaken by PR agencies keen to make sure that a rant by a disgruntled customer on an obscure blog didn’t end up on the front pages of the national press. Any engagement that brands had with online conversations was entirely reactive and typically confined to damage limitation.

The likes of Twitter and Facebook, though, have been game-changing and we are now in a situation where all sorts of people all over the world are having conversations about brands online. We’ve seen a huge amplification of volume in the last couple of years and a clear network effect developing – everyone from blue chip FMCG companies to the Prime Minister wants to know exactly what’s being said about their brand online, who’s saying it and, more importantly, what they should do about it.

As the amount of online conversations has increased, so has their significance to brands. Instead of just revealing the extremes of opinion of a small but vocal minority, online conversations now offer a wealth of rich data that can be mined for insights. Given the right tools (and more importantly, the right expertise) online conversations can be a continuous source of information for brands and a daily touchpoint with their customers.

The possibilities from both a qualitative and quantitative perspective are huge: you can use social media monitoring to help understand everything from category choices to the lifestyles of different segments and look at data on either an individual or aggregate basis. Many brands have been surprised at the insights that are just waiting to be uncovered. In a recent project for a mobile phone manufacturer we were able to give fresh insights into a range of social and cultural minutiae of daily life on and offline.

As social media has moved from being an activity for early-adopter bloggers to something many people participate in many times a day via their iPhones and BlackBerries, an array of tools has sprung up to help brands manage their reputations online. First there was NetRatings, then the big research firms followed, and now there are more than 200 monitoring tools on the market. In the last two years there have been two major evolutions in the market that have contributed to this explosion.

First, numerous free tools such as Klout and Google Analytics have become available, and secondly software-focused vendors have created tools that trawl the internet for consumer conversations. While neither are research tools per se, they have a clear application for businesses looking to understand their online profiles. Tools within the second category fall into two camps – data-heavy tools that allow you to analyse pretty much anything and those that seek to win points for whizzy interfaces and pretty dashboards. We recently conducted a review of the available tools for social media monitoring, and the chart below compares their depth of analysis and user-friendliness.

One size fits none
While there are tools out there promising to reveal everything from online sentiment to the effect of ‘influencers’, the challenge for researchers is how to pick the right tools for the job. It’s not realistic to think that one tool can meet the entire business’ objectives – some are designed more for reactive, PR use, others are better for insight and research. As so many products have flooded on to the market and everyone from the marketing department to corporate risk has got excited about it, we are in danger of social media monitoring tools being used as an extremely blunt instrument.

While some departments do need to receive a quick snapshot of key data and might benefit from a well put together dashboard tool such as Brandwatch, colleagues in other roles such as customer analytics would be better suited to data heavy tools such as Radian 6 which is more extensive in the amount of data it gathers and offers scope for greater analysis (providing, of course, that you have the expertise to manipulate the data and draw out the insights). The important thing here is to understand that while multiple departments within the business may have a need to monitor social media conversations, their proficiency at extracting insights from any given tool will vary enormously.

Working with an agency that offers access to the full range of tools, can advise on which ones are best suited for each project and can perform the necessary analysis is an effective way to ensure that everyone in the business can get maximum insight, irrespective of their ability to manipulate pivot tables.

There’s no substitute for good data management
One key thing to watch out for when selecting social media measurement tools is the provider’s approaches to data management. A worrying number of tools proudly launch updates at regular intervals and shout about the fact that they can now index even more conversations. But bragging that “my coverage is bigger than yours” rather misses the point – just adding more conversations into the analysis doesn’t deepen the level of insight you may find. As any researcher knows, upping the sample size doesn’t automatically lead to better research.

Beware of the urge for ‘instant’ results
In all things, a clear danger of the internet and our ‘always on’ society is a desire for immediate gratification. While social media monitoring can give rapid results and accelerate the traditional research process, a common misconception is that it can give real-time feedback on virtually any question. Some processes (such as notification on new negative sentiment) can be automated, but the usual trade-offs between speed and quality still apply.

We were recently asked to mine everything that had been said about the announcement of a new electronic product within 24 hours, a job which can’t be done with the click of a few buttons. The tools do trawl the internet 24/7, but they can’t be everywhere all the time, and the data cleansing (de-duplicating, recoding of sentiment) also takes time. In reality what was needed was a painstaking analysis done by hand as no tool could actually do such a thorough job within the time available.

Perfecting the art
As with most new techniques, social media monitoring brings a great deal of buzz and excitement but it also brings its challenges. The most crucial learning for any agency or clientside researchers to remember is that social media monitoring is an art, not a science. While we all look forward to tools that can automate time-consuming (and frankly, often dull processes) and give us ready access to millions of respondents, we must be careful not to leave the researcher out of the equation.

Yes, the possibilities afforded by social media monitoring tools are huge, but the art is in knowing what to use, how to use it and when. Choosing the right tools is just a small part of the equation – unless you have the expertise to actually look at the data generated by social media monitoring tools and analyse it properly, you could buy every single social media monitoring tool going and be none the wiser for it. Unless we get this bit right, there will be no real insights from social media monitoring, just a meaningless sea of statistics.

I look forward to the time when metrics from social media monitoring studies become as important to boardrooms as customer satisfaction and Net Promoter scores, but before that can happen we need to see the same consistent definitions, accuracy and rigour that you would expect from any of the more established methodologies.

James Turner is research director at FreshMinds Research