Social Media Monitoring: Human Intervention

Firstly I need to apologize for the prolonged silence. My wife and I had our second child 5 weeks ago and we've been in newborn lock down!

Here is my latest column in this week's B&T.



Any business should always strive to know exactly how their consumer’s feel about them at any given time. Whether this is in response to a piece of activity, in response to someone else’s opinion or just part of ongoing reputation management. As a marketer I was continually seeking new ways to get a read on ‘real’ brand perception not just perception generated from moderated methodology.

Social media monitoring tools give businesses a new way of understanding what people are saying about their brand and how influential these people are. There are a lot of good tools hitting the market that are either fee or subscription based. Tools like Nielsen Buzz metrics, Steamwall, Buzzlogic, Buzznumbers, Sentiment Metrics, Dialogix, Blogpulse, Google alerts & Twitter Search just to name a few. At The Population, we have decided to go with a combination of Radian 6 and other free monitoring and analytics tools that allow us to build a more rounded picture.

Whilst all the tools have their own distinct features and selling points, there is one consistency no matter which one you use. Social media monitoring tools are only as good as the individual running them. Relying on an automated tool is like a focus group without a moderator and without a moderator, a focus group is worthless. .

The monitoring tools are key word based. The keyword strategy is incredibly important. It will determine the quality and relevance of information retrieved. Your output is only as good as the information you put in. And when the brand has broad meaning like Apple, Pizza Hut or Target, you can imagine the difficulty in getting relevant analysis.

But the real task lies in making sense of the information retrieved. A human brain is needed to mine and analyze the data to determine sentiment (no matter what they tell you this cannot be automated), topic aggregation, information flow, source of opinion, trends, competitive association & geography. Most importantly though tying all the information together for brand insight can only be done by someone who really understands the information and can build association with other data sources like Google analytics, existing online metrics, Google blog search etc.

When social media monitoring is done well, the insight that a brand can gather is enormously valuable. However, if you are looking for an automated set and forget report, you might end up drowning in whole lot of irrelevant data.