Out: Google Feeds. In: Social Intelligence.
- Details
- Author: John Tonini & Liz Tahawi
- Wednesday, November 23, 2011
When you tweet, post on a public Facebook page, or start a discussion on a board, you are authoring content that can later be socially tracked. As more of us add to these conversations, the social platforms and social content available to track grow exponentially. More users, more platforms, and more content provide more customer engagements for us to evaluate. It is an ever-increasing online focus group to tap into for marketers. Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, message boards, Google+ and LinkedIn all make some portion of their content publicly available. Besides their words, some of the personal details of the author including gender, age, and location may be viewable by others, too. However, more content also means more work and effort to organize and make sense of it all. In just two years, the volume of content stored in a leading social intelligence platform increased more than 13x from 1.5 billion to 20 billion, and the number of sites in their index increased by more than 4x. That’s why “Listening” using only Google feeds and web crawling provides only a fraction of the data available.
Why Listen?
Collecting and interpreting this data can be challenging and the learning must be perceived as directional. (It’s nearly impossible to capture everything!) However, when done right, this data collection can prove to be incredibly insightful and can help provide a sound basis for making marketing decisions. This is why it is called “Social Intelligence.” As marketers, it can help us measure and substantiate our brand’s social context. This way, we can evaluate and benchmark our own social efforts. It can help us corroborate marketplace movements, such as, “Hey, Millennials seem to love us! Maybe we should connect with them more often.” Listening can also serve as the first concrete harbinger of developments to come – helpful for forecasting, staying ahead of trends, and for heading off bad news at the pass. More reasons? Listening can also help with lead generation and keep us up-to-task on our competition.
Dashboard Guidance
We believe viewing this sea of information through a social media dashboard helps—a lot. There are a number of types and sources of social media content, which are “readable” from a variety of platforms. Those are the inputs on the graph. (More on these in a minute.) Humans input keywords in listening tools---Socialarc uses Alterian SM2, Radian6 and Sysomos--and set parameters such as what not to listen for, timeframes, and other filters like location and language. The tools then capture our data, hence, the robot, but humans must step back in to fine-tune and analyze the results. Then, back to technology to create a Dashboard that makes sense to our brand and its business objectives.
Not all Results are meaningful
Listening results are full of interesting surprises. No matter how complex a Boolean search you create or how extensive a blacklist of sites you might use to filter, there will be content that isn’t relevant. You’d be surprised at how many apartment listings mention how close they are to Safeway, which would be meaningless when conducting a Safeway brand analysis. This is why it takes live, thinking people to “scrub” the data set and to have a tool that lets you do this. On top of this, “organic content” that references your brand is, generally, blog posts, 140 character tweets, videos, and shared promotions. These are all counted as “mentions” and are valued the same weight by a listening platform. This is another reason why our recommended strategy is to choose the right tools combined with the right human process to help you value the difference behind the mention. (Two tweets are not always twice as good as one detailed blog post.)
Conclusion
Just like the Internet it lives in, social data is complex, growing and directional. However, its budding insights are a tremendous resource and represent a fabulous opportunity for marketers. Whether you are deeply involved in your brand’s social media world or just beginning to decipher your chosen listening platform results, it is important to set the right expectations and make sure your tools are aligned with your business objectives.
