Social Media Monitoring Software – Welcome to the Emerald City

After four weeks of evaluating social media software vendors, we’ve come to some conclusions about the reality of these tools versus the hype that we heard along the way. Let’s just say that the parallels to the Wizard of Oz are pretty interesting…

Ever since I played the Wizard in third grade at Grant School,  I’ve really loved this movie, the books, and all things Oz in general. In fact, the head janitor at my town’s high school (Westfield HS in NJ) was one of the flying monkeys in the movie! But I digress…

Impact Interactions provides multiple types of social media services to our clients including consulting, moderation, and reporting. We’ve also been doing social media monitoring for several years for a couple of clients (although it was first called Brand Defense, then Reputation Management, and now Social Media Monitoring). It was a natural extension for our trained moderation teams to help clients. We’ve been looking for a good tool for our monitoring projects rather than relying on manual means of collection. We’ve spent several weeks talking with prospective clients for this service (and yes, it’s a service but more on that later). We’ve also been socializing ideas at conferences with other social media and online community folks to build our business case for adding this service.  So with all of that background, here is how the Wizard of Oz fits in…

I Am The Great And Powerful Oz!

In listening to people speak about social media monitoring tools, they believe that they are an all powerful tool for learning where all active conversations about their brand are being held online. The content is fresh, vibrant, and oh so relevant to their business objectives. Many believe that they’ll be able to manage the flow of information with this great tool, driving insights into their organizations effectively through the export of reports from these all powerful tools. Blogs- check. Twitter- check. Article comments- check. Communities- check. Sentiment analysis- check.

Unfortunately some of the hype around these tools has put vendors in the position of trying to meet these expectations with tools that look great, work smoothly, and export reports in a single click.

Ignore That Man Behind The Curtain!

Just as the Wizard was discovered to be a mere mortal, many customers are discovering that they had expectations that were far too high for the tools. What they are finding is that the tools take someone to work with them daily to review the delivered content, decide which nuggets of information are relevant, build the trends in content sentiment, and create the report.  Just as Dorothy and friends put all their faith in the wizard only to be disappointed when Toto pulled the curtain back, many companies are finding out that Social Media Monitoring requires more than a tool… it requires a team to review the content and deliver what is relevant.

I’m Not A Bad Person, Really.

The software vendors on the other hand must shake their heads when they hear the expectations for their tools. In our discussions with many of the top vendors (and some start ups too), we found them refreshingly honest about the capabilities of their tools. This was especially the case when the hot topics of Sentiment Analysis,  Twitter, and Online Community searches came up.

Sentiment analysis is an art form, not an absolute according to every single vendor we spoke with. The range of accuracy claimed by the vendors we spoke to ranged from a low of 30% to a high of 55%. In our B2B and B2C report testing, that range seems about right. Since most if not all vendors use a similar algorithm to categorize content, that would make sense.

In essence these tools work by analysing the 2-3 words prior and after the associated keyword to determine sentiment. As we can demonstrate, there are many false positives and negatives. To counter that, most allow the end user to rate or assign sentiment to content they find with the idea of strengthening the algorithm for future searches.

Twitter is another interesting discussion. Since Twitter is the social media du jour, everyone is interested in their Twitter buzz. The issue is that these tools use the Twitter search functionality rather than getting a full read into the Twitter Database of Tweets. (Say that five times fast!) So even the top tools are not much better than doing a Twitter search on your own. But as we were told, everyone of the vendors is working on this. According to Microsoft, Bing will have this capability soon. (Kara Swisher broke the news on this one.)

When the subject of online community content was discussed we received the same honest answers from everyone.  If the community has an RSS feed, they can get the information. If it doesn’t you are out of luck. We also learned that several vendors are working on a new tact to obtain the deepest of relationship content. One of those vendors is Boardreader. They are a company to watch if your interest is in content from communities.

The Good News – The Wizard Can Help!

Just as the Wizard offered to help Dorothy return to Kansas, many of the vendors in this space will offer to help clients to structure the searches for their project. But in the end, Toto runs off and Dorothy is still stuck in Oz. All the best intentions cannot overcome the single point that organizations need someone to run and make sense of the volumes of data these tools provide.

How Do We Get Back to Kansas Now?

Sometimes despite visiting a Wizard and killing a Witch or two along the way, you still need help to get where you want to go. That’s where we come in. At Impact Interactions, we recognize that Social Media Monitoring is a service. The choice of tools is important without a doubt, but it takes a person to effectively use the tool and report the results. We offer Social Media Monitoring as a service for clients.

Impact Interactions - A One Stop Shop for Social Media Monitoring

Impact Interactions has a great social media team using a top notch tool to provide social media insight reports for our clients. We understand that you are interested in seeing where the conversations are happening, but don’t have the time to review 1,000 blog posts, 400 tweets, and 500 comments each day. By hiring Impact Interactions, you can concentrate on your strategy while our team provides your Ruby Slippers. And you don’t even have to drop a house on us to get them.

But we don’t stop there! Our team’s experience in online communities is deep. Our social media associates can help you respond to bloggers, commenters, and Twitterers too. We believe that a social media monitoring project should be integrated into your communication efforts. Our team can help you execute that strategy at a reasonable cost.

Want to learn more? Please contact us or give us a call at (410) 604-3304 to discuss how your organization and team can get the most out of social media monitoring services.

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10 Responses to “Social Media Monitoring Software – Welcome to the Emerald City”

Adam Mertz says:

October 22, 2009 at 7:07 pm

Nice post Mike. Totally agree – this is a new role (social media expert) that some org’s will hire for and if they don’t they’re going to need to outsource. Otherwise they’re probably not getting the most out of their investment.

Just curious, what buzz monitoring tool did you end up going with after your assessment?

Tweets that mention Social Media Monitoring Software - Welcome to the Emerald City | Impact Interactions -- Topsy.com says:

October 22, 2009 at 10:01 pm

[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Impact Interactions and MRowland602, Kristen Lawrence. Kristen Lawrence said: Found this super interesting! Social Media Monitoring Tools – We're Off to See the Wizard…. http://bit.ly/1IVbym [...]

MRowland says:

October 23, 2009 at 10:06 am

Hi Adam,

Thanks for the comment. After our reviews, we actually are using several solutions and still testing them against each other. Our primary tool for now is Scoutlabs, with support from several community tracking tools as well. A client has access to Radian6 and we’re comparing notes to see which does the best job. Interestingly enough from a raw data standpoint the tools are about even. The sentiment analysis is slightly different at times, but that can be updated by the user. But because of the intensity of community members, we have to supplement the tools with a secondary tool as well.

We are looking into building a dashboard that will allow us to receive better community information as well as a full Twitter feed in addition to the blog and comment content in a single page to make the process even more efficient.

Edited by Mike – Just saw your SMM tool for Jive SBS. How is the adoption going?

Michael Fraietta says:

October 23, 2009 at 1:21 pm

Hello Mike,

Nice post, cleverly done.
Not sure if you reviewed Filtrbox in the process. We just had a massive release with new features and coverage. If you’d be interested in a demo/trial, let me know and we’ll help you get down the yellow brick road.

Michael Fraietta
Filtrbox
@MichaelFraietta
http://fbx.bz/E

Warren Sukernek says:

October 23, 2009 at 2:37 pm

Love the analogy between the monitoring tools and the man behind the curtain. Too often, we believe the fantasy that the black box social media monitoring tool will provide all the answers with just a few keystrokes. But as you point out, it takes real work. The tools are easy to use, but difficult to master. In order to really get actionable insights out of the tools, users must put in the time to extract those nuggets. In my experience, very few users have the time to do that. Thus, we end up with pretty graphs of little substance. Thanks for leading the way out of the forest, Mr. Wizard.

MRowland says:

October 23, 2009 at 2:56 pm

Hi Michael,

We did look at filtrbox as part of our review, we had a great demo session of the product. It is solid and we are telling folks that it is definitely one of the products to consider as part of the selection process.

Mike

Lauren Vargas says:

October 23, 2009 at 3:01 pm

You are correct…you cannot just slap the tool in front of user and expect the data to magically appear or insights gathered. There is training and practice required…also, the tool chosen depends a lot on the organization culture, strategies and objectives.

If you need any assistance with the dashboard you refer to in the comments, please let us know so we can work with you and your client to get the most out of this robust tool.

Lauren Vargas
Community Manager at Radian6
@VargasL

MRowland says:

October 23, 2009 at 3:07 pm

Hi Warren,

Thanks for the nice comments. We’ve seen it before and we’ll see it again with another set of tools that are mis-understood by the audience because of the hype. I believe that most of the vendors are trying to temper the expectations of their prospects. But the idea of setting up a tool on autopilot is so appealing that most customers miss the point about how much work it takes to get relevant, valuable results.

For example, if you run a report on our client Cisco Systems with the term router or telecommunications as general key words and then reduce the scale by introducing negative key words for jobs, stocks, investments, press releases, etc. you’ll still get over 1500 results just from blogs each day.

You can set up multiple well defined searches with product names or services, but as soon as you add a big brand name the content the returns become massive. With the re-posting of content all over the web there is a lot to sift through to find the value. Auto piloting the reports may work for some smaller brands, but for major brands it takes time and staff to distill the real insights.

Mike

MRowland says:

October 23, 2009 at 3:11 pm

Hi Lauren,

Thanks for the validation comments. I appreciate Radian6’s perspective in the conversation (and your offer of help).

Mike

Andrew says:

November 18, 2009 at 5:05 pm

Mike,

Great post, I just came across it on the web managers roundtable group on LinkedIn.

Have you evaluated RightNow Technologies’ Cloud Monitor tool? You can view a flash demo here:
http://www.rightnow.com/resource-demo-cloud-monitor.php

Let me know if you would like to talk further.

Andrew