Social Media Monitoring – Man vs. Machine

I’ve been reading several tweets and blog posts about how social media tools such as Radian6 and Scout Labs are gaining traction in the enterprise. That’s not a surprise given the interest in protecting your brand online and uncovering loyal enthusiasts.

In our early Web 1.0 days, we used to do this manually for SAP. Back in 2003, we monitored  competitor communities for SAP related content. In 2004 when blogs started to catch on, we found information on several blogs where we could help SAP extend its online reputation.

Now in the wide open Web 2.0+ days, many folks believe that there are too many sources for an individual to keep up with from a monitoring perspective. Many attendees of the recent Online Community Unconference held in June asked our team for our thoughts on sentiment analysis, brand monitoring software, and on brand defense issues.

Our thoughts? Simple, the tools are still evolving and are not quite there yet. For example, the leading criticism of these tools that we have is that they cannot account for context in their analysis of sentiment. Sarcasm is missed. (Of course, no one is really sarcastic in their social media posting are they?)

That’s why you need someone who understands your business to help manage the sentiment analysis and the content it identifies. Social media monitoring is still a bit of an art form. The tools are and will continue to get better, but human interactions require human analysis too. This is something that all brand managers should be doing on a regular basis, even daily for larger brands.

Want to get started with social media monitoring? It’s easy and it’s free. Use Google Alerts, Technorati, Keotag, and BoardTrackerto start. These are all free applications that do a very good job in getting you the content you need to analyze.  But analyze it you must (in Yoda-speak) because it still takes a human to understand the content.

If you’d like to learn more, leave us a comment or contact us. We’re happy to help.

Back to the blog