Problems with social media technologies
October 16th, 2009 -
In the summer Hyper Happen’s Asi Sharabi wrote an anguished post about dealing with the output from social media dashboards. Luke Brynley-Jones, who is putting together a panel at Monitoring Social Media next month, asked me to talk about it. At the risk of “scooping” my contribution, this is what I wrote:
My sense is that there are several issues at work here. There are inflated expectations of what the software can do on its own. There is a general reluctance to appreciate the scale of the undertaking. Put at its most simple, each partner client, agency and measurement specialist needs to field folks with real expertise in:
- The brand and its online community
- Online engagement as a domain
- The chosen tool and its most useful metrics
- The client’s business, its capabilities for response
and to devote (as Asi complains) real time to it. It is messy, because no one tool performs all the tasks you need, and much of it requires painstaking manual cross-referencing. We never devote less than a day to compiling a monthly report of most of the brands we cover (often a day and a half or even two). 2-3 people work on it. We don’t just use our LiveBuzz monitoring tool, we use Google, Yahoo!, whois.net, search Twitter direct, in short cross-reference and check everything. Without a contextual report the value of any tool alone is hugely reduced.
Outstanding issues:
- Missing data (getting better, but always an issue)
- Flaws in identification and automation of topics
- Automated sentimenting that works for some contexts (high volume, generic) but is weak in others (low volume, specific)
- Conversations that are a propos but don’t appear in the tool’s on-topic conversation bucket (e.g. posts on a brand page, Facebook groups, petitions, backlinks)
On a higher level I think that Asi’s frustrations result in part from the job he is being asked to do. It is unsolvable by him. He is not being given the resources (time) needed to really add value here by addressing the big issues:
- The context: what can you benchmark this conversation against? What is the history of the debate? Is that data even available?
- The business value: how do you derive really valuable actions from the data? Who has the expertise to do it? (It ought to be the agency, but they are often too close to the fray, and have an agenda which can lead them to recommend marketing activities of some kind – and this may not always be the best response)
- Having recommended specific actions, who undertakes them on the client side? Is this a marketing issue, or a business process issue, or a customer service issue, or a strategic issue for the business? All those siloes of the business have to be bought in for the thing to work.
In short: social media monitoring tools stand at the bleeding edge of the social media “question” for the industry, a question to which no one has yet formulated the full answer.
That question can be summarised thus:
- How does a business take full account of the value of the insights that are now available to me from the net?
- What is the role of my existing activities? Are they all valuable? Which ones do I keep and which discard?
- Who takes those decisions within the business? How are the decisions validated?
- What become of all of the existing stakeholders: internal teams like PR, marketing, brand, investor relations, customer service? Can I reorganise around this change?
- What becomes of all my “talking” activities, via all the different agency partners, promotions, DM, above the line, below the line? Do I centralise them, consolidate them? Drive everything via an “insights and measurement” strategy?
My cheeky response is that Asi is a square peg in a round hole. The client is apparently asking him to become a Market Sentinel analyst without providing him with a budget! He needs an analyst to work for him to do the grunt work, so that he can add his value by addressing the big client-focussed questions.
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Luke Brynley-Jones October 16, 2009 at 5:33 pm
I knew you’d have an interesting angle on the debate Mark
In essence, I think you’re saying Asi has made a compelling case for the existence of social media monitoring companies – precisely so that he doesn’t have to worry about the issues he’s concerned with. I’ll be interested to see how he and Amelia Torode respond to that at MSM09.
Dash October 17, 2009 at 5:16 pm
The “tools” industry struggles to build useful products because corporate users are uncertain what role social media can or should play in their business. PR? Media Relations? Customer Support? Advertising? And, at what level of investment? Free tools don’t use themselves.
Most people I’ve seen that appear happy with their tools are those single employee experts that are only monitoring conversations, and then “engaging” in random ways. When a company sells millions of units, it is critical that solutions scale. Today, no one is generating scalable solutions.
Yes, a few PR-specific tools have been sold through as useful because they enable users to “capture” and track new mailing lists of reporters or influencers. But these same experts then bombard journalists or suspected influencers with pitches.
The most useful tools, thus far, are the ones that support customer service usage. But, look at the expense being incurred. These corporations might have been smarter to simply provide good phone support in the first place.
And the marketers flogging deals and products are likewise kidding themselves. This is pure experimentation. The Dell example everyone uses is not a profitable, nor scalable, experiment when you apply all the Overheads that were required to make it work.
What concerns me is how many tools suppliers I’ve met that simply think DIY monitoring is a business. Those providers may make enough to cover their mortgages this year, but I suspect they won’t be around in another year.
In my opinion, these are all false starts.
gianandrea facchini October 21, 2009 at 8:02 am
“What concerns me is how many tools suppliers I’ve met that simply think DIY monitoring is a business. Those providers may make enough to cover their mortgages this year, but I suspect they won’t be around in another year.” You are 100% correct. That’s why I sell to my clients the analysis more than the tool and we develop along with the client actionable insights coming from the monitoring service.
Paul Gailey July 9, 2010 at 4:31 pm
“The most useful tools, thus far, are the ones that support customer service usage.” – How true.
Speaking with the marketing hat on, I say the value of an open conversation in SM instead of a call centre closed telephone call is so superior, yet organisations knee jerk is to label the call centre, the “call” centre. In the “customer centre” many of those exchanges of information, even the repetitive ones can still be held in one to one manner online that are equally public. As long as there is a method to transfer the public exchange to a private one at the right point, then the process is highly preferable to a tel. call relationship.
And if I as a consumer can view the above as a more enjoyable and quicker interaction, because I´m not held in a call queue, then surely that is a good experience which I can share online.