These days it is easy to get overwhelmed. Gone are the days where you could easily track your message’s whereabouts in placements generated by you. A message, brand and company are no longer sole property of the print world, the Internet changed all of that. The Internet gave voice to that missing piece of the puzzle: the voice of the public. With the voice of the public engaging more heavily in conversation comes the monitoring of that conversation, among blogs, forums, Facebook, Twitter, etc., with social media monitoring. Social media monitoring consists of combining results from a variety of measurement tools and using them to measure campaign effectiveness and goal achievement, something that cannot be done with tools alone. One of the newer tools that may soon gain more traction is Twitter. Most people measure its effectiveness simply through retweets, but now Twitter is giving its users the ability to geographically target tweets and the analytics to measure the additional effects of a tweet http://bit.ly/hDGZqR. With geo-relevant tweets, McDonald’s Canada can now target tweets to its segment of the McDonald’s public about menu options that appeal to them, such as peach pie and chocolate-coffee milkshakes. Then with Twitter’s new Follower Dashboard they can measure more than just retweets. Follows, unfollows, click-through and other actions that result are now included so that a more complete picture of the response is generated. For example, RadioShack generated its #ineedanewphone hashtag last December. Using the Follower Dashboard they saw 65 million impressions, an above average engagement rate of 8.8% and wireless platform sales increase in double digits all within days of launching the promoted trend. All with the addition of these tracking features.
While increases in monitoring options are crucial to seeing the whole big picture, they in no way limit your involvement. If anything they make it more important. Data means nothing without interpretation and judgement, and only a human being can analyze and interpret data and decide how to use it for the benefit of the brand and the company. Some people think that all you have to do is rely on the tools you use. That is the biggest mistake, when you take yourself out of the equation, because it is not that simple. Different tools are better at different things, it takes you to pull the best feedback from each and analyze it for your purposes. A social media monitoring tool cannot do that task and nothing can take the place of human analysis and interpretation. Both tools and human monitoring and analysis should always be used in tandem. Take for example the sentiment analysis that tools like UberVU have as part of their service http://bit.ly/9z981Y. A message is not simply neutral, negative or positive. Interpretations are subjective and tools do not have an effective reasoning component built into them. With social media monitoring, the most important thing is to plan what you are measuring, construct and distribute your message, evaluate and analyze the data and use it to inform your future decisions. Not giving enough thought to any one of these steps can be a critical misstep. Social media monitoring is an effective and essential tool, but only if it is used correctly. Tools were invented to help you manage the work, not do the work for you. You are an important part of social media monitoring, not just your tools. Never take yourself out of the equation. As long as you use social media monitoring tools to inform, and not control, you will be on the right track to getting your desired results.
Making Social Media Monitoring Effective
Tags: ad views, clicks, facebook likes, follows, Google +1's, how to use social media monitoring tools, making social media monitoring more effective, meaningful conversations important for brands, measuring campaign effectiveness, measuring impressions better, measuring social media effectiveness, mentions, reach and frequency of social media, social media marketing, social media metrics, social media monitoring, social media monitoring tools, viewing and liking content instead of acting on it
Social media monitoring is a flawed system. When we break down the phrase notice that it begins with the word social. Being social is about reaching out to a lot of people, but it’s also about the quality of relationships with those people, which is something social media is not measuring. In order to remain social, the quality of relationships must be preserved. That’s inherently what’s wrong with social media monitoring, but let’s get into specifics just to clarify exactly what are the issues at stake.
Bob Knorpp states that “We aren’t valuing conversations. We are valuing reach and frequency” http://bit.ly/mYN2Jy. Basically, social media values reach and frequency over sentiments and customer satisfaction. Reach and frequency are barely scratching the surface when it comes to social media monitoring. Another fault with social media monitoring is that it doesn’t improve revenue per customer, overall customer value, or promote a better understanding of customer value when a single campaign management suite is used http://bit.ly/mTMdDg. Focusing solely on social media doesn’t fully capture the effectiveness of a campaign, because you’re only engaging a small sector of your audience through a single channel. However, social media monitoring is also flawed because the tools are not advanced enough to capture the metrics needed to evaluate these relationships. ANA CEO Bob Liodice maintains that “…digital media has always offered better data than others for some marketers and uses…but it hasn’t offered the precision in audience measurement that brand advertisers need to compare the effectiveness…” http://bit.ly/rbIG5r. Social media monitoring it due for an overhaul, a makeover of sorts. In other words, it’s time for a change.
We may not be mind readers, able to predict exactly what motivates action and what sparks the most positive reactions that lead to the desired actions, but we have to measure it somehow to the best of our abilities. The following changes would help get us closer to that objective. The first step in making social media monitoring more effective would be to use multiple channels. Your audience uses multiple channels so you should be reaching them wherever they are at. Use multiple social media channels and/or use a variety of channels (print, video, web, radio, direct mail, etc.) to paint a more complete picture. In their article’s closing statement eMarketer relates that “…working collaboratively across functions and channels helps connect the dots after a campaign is complete and makes the most of what a company discovered throughout the process” http://bit.ly/mTMdDg. The next step to include would be measuring overall impressions, not just clicks, page visits or ad views. This step might involve conducting surveys and focus groups regarding a brand’s social media efforts, in order to more accurately capture how they are perceived and acted upon. Perhaps the most important of all these is the one I saved for last, focus on meaningful conversations. If meaningful content is what attracts people, then meaningful conversations and interactions will have the best long-term results.
In short, measuring reach and frequency is important, but it doesn’t capture the whole picture. It’s like saying you know lots of people and then realizing they are merely acquaintances and that you haven’t put in the effort to advance the relationship. You might have lots of “likes”, “followers”, “+1′s” etc. but that says nothing about the quality of the relationship you have with them. Quality is just as important as quantity, if not more so. Improving the quality of your brand’s social media relationships can effect better results, and improving the quality of your social media monitoring can ensure that those relationships stick around and multiply.