Sunday 5 December 2010

Social Media Monitoring: Why using search engines is not enough?

Most people think that they can conduct their Social Media monitoring using search engines only. I'm a big fan of Google but we have to wade through a massive number of irrelevant messages.

The use of search engines:
• Help find some information, but they do not pinpoint information, you will not be able to process the entire amount of information.
• Information humanly processed: Going through the websites and directories is labor intensive, error-prone, tedious and time-consuming.
• Inefficient methods: the time analysts spend to find, collect and aggregate data instead of analyzing data and gaining the competitive edge.
• Ranking technology will not let you retrieve first the more relevant documents.

Let's say that we spent hours (even days) to build a corpus of relevant messages around our subject of interest:

Corpus of relevant data.
Now that we have structured data we can use that information in order to produce different kind of deliverables, here are some examples:
• A newsletter per Business unit or division.
• A dashboard: a graphical scorecard which measures the evolution of the number of documents, compares persons or brands, evaluates the tonality of discussions, identifies the most critical message, blog post, tweet or discussion, then list the most active sources and determines the issues that are most often addressed and the companies most often quoted concerning a given issue and that for all types of sources and in all languages.
• Experts can use this system in order to write reports that can be published in a format and with a frequency adapted to recipient needs (weekly CGM summary, monthly reports, quarterly studies, strategic analyses or recommendations…).

Maybe you have a powerful tool for analytical processing of information but do you really know what your information need is? Did you take the time to qualify the information that you need to gather?
Prior to start using a Social Media Intelligence tool it is necessary to qualify your daily and strategic needs in terms of information in order to optimize your monitoring system in the best possible way.
These can range from knowing your brand health to engaging with your audience online and optimizing your image or defining new risks and protecting against them.

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