Future Of Social Media Monitoring

The Future of Social Media Monitoring
Marshall Sponder
Webmetricsguru.com
Monitoring Social Media 09
London – November 17th, 2009

Current Situation : Social Media Monitoring Platforms
Forrester Wave Q1 09
“ …. brand monitoring platforms faithfully report on brand conversations and competitive news, they do not go far enough to turn this information into marketing insights.” – page 2
“…. While vendors aspire to deliver strategic insights to support the marketing organizations, they are often stuck in the world of tracking, monitoring, and delivering dashboards centered on operational metrics like mentions, reach, and discussion volume..” Page 3.

Only the largest platforms were listed
… Additionally, vendors included met two specific selection criteria:
Corporate revenues in excess of $10 million
A substantial base of enterprise sized clients. According to that definition, several vendors that could have potentially been reviewed were excluded – many of them more interesting than the main entrants

What “conversations are” – except Liz Strauss (but, no formal definition yet on how conversations are measured)
The current definition of positive, negative or neutral opinion (sentiment)
How Listening Platforms integrate with disparate information collected from call centers, branch offices, POS systems, direct mail, PPC data, web analytics data, marketing data, in house data ……
Meaningful consulting services to help businesses engage with the data they are collecting.
And no one defined…..

Sentiment Analysis, today – too much like Quantum Physics
Crimson Hexagon
Alterian/Techrigy/SM2
Same profile, same exact query

Influencer Lists – very noisy
Who are the main influencer’s behind Chris Anderson’s FREE book?
TechDirt’s Mike Masnick? Gawker Media’s Ryan Tate? Malcolm Gladwell doing a favor for his friend, Chris Anderson?
Radian6 Influencer lists take a lot of work to get much useful out of them.

Social Media Campaigns take 3 months to 1 year to show tangible results …. What should we monitor to show success?
No indication of what to measure, no clear baseline on what is realistic to expect after 3 months, 6 months, 9 months and 1 year.
No clear idea on how much to spend for Social Media
No standards on what Social Media is and how it would be measured.
Today, 99% of the time ,Social Media takes a long time before you see any results

Most Social Media Platforms not capable of advanced Semantic Analysis/Meme Clustering
Radian6
Alterian
Blogpulse
Marshall – sounds like you are talking about meme clustering much like Techmeme does for tech stories, taking posts with similar themes/topics and naturally grouping them together because they contain similar concepts (but not in pre-specified categories). Right? – Marcel Lebrun – Radian6
Crimson Hexagon

Awful Geo-Location capabilities
Finding Local Blogs and Bloggers
Alterian
Of the 312 blog entries located in New York – 30 were from blogs/bloggers that were actually in New York . Had better luck with local directories and blogger lists.

Social Media Monitoring Solutions Wiki - http://ow.ly/x5cL
A lot of overlap between “free” vs. “paid” social media tools
Often, these tools do the same things (though not the same way) – confusion abounds. Should I use a free tool or buy an expensive monitoring solution?

No Standards for Social Media and little desire from SM vendors for them
Web Analytics now has a Standards Doc for basic metrics such as Visits, Unique Visitors, Bounce Rate, etc. http://webanalyticsassociation.org/attachments/committees/5/WAA_Web_Analytics_Definitions_20080922_For_Public_Comment.pdf
Social Media - much more problematic, field is still in it’s infancy, most vendors of SM Tool platforms/vendors do not want to sit down at the same table and discuss a common set of standards for a variety of reasons.
What does the future hold?

Social Media Monitoring 2012….
Future Social Media Monitoring 2 years out …..

Future of the Social Web
Based on a Forrester Report – I believe the milestones of the Social Web, above, will also lead to vast improvements in measurement technology by 2012.

Meme Tracking becomes a common capability of select paid and free tools
Along with the ability to act on data (great for PR, Political Outreach, Non-Profits)
……what if Crimson Hexagon also collected the Twitter accounts of each opinion along with the opinion mapping? I know they have the data, with a 75% to 80% accuracy, at this time, of mapping snippets to the actual opinion categories, and 3% error rate in drawing out the percentages of each category – why couldn’t they take a stab at matching it up … webmetricsguru.com blog

Integration of Social Media Tools with Web Analytics, CRM, Search Query Data, etc.
Google will accelerate the merging of Social Media, Web Analytics and Search – by integrating Social Media Monitoring into Google Analytics producing a shakeout in the Monitoring Platform community.
Google’s entrance into the Analytics field through purchasing Urchin in 2005 put pressure on all the high end WA platforms (Omniture, Coremetrics, WebTrends) leading to the sale of Omniture to Adobe recently , and declining sales– expect the same results in SM field

….. Pairing up Web Analytics Guru type, Creative and Social Media Community Managers into teams to create and track social media campaigns.
Social Media tools merge more and more with Site Analytics and Search Tools.
Social Media ROI will began to be “cracked”.
New Social Media “Teams” formed

Social Media Reputation monitoring on Google SideWiki comments.
Google SearchWiki comment tracking working it’s way into Radian6 and other Tracking Platforms.
Google Caffeine update continues to accelerate real time search results and feeds Google with data it can pump into Google Analytics.
Social Media Monitoring tools will evolve to monitor Google Waves.
Businesses will adopt Social Media via the Real Time Search Results – they will have no choice but to do so.
Social Search will fuel development of new Social Media Monitoring Capabilities, such as

Through studying what is happening in Web Analytics and Search Marketing in the last two years it’s possible to make some reasoned assumptions on the future of Social Media Monitoring as a field, within the next two years.
1. Merging Social Media Strategy and Monitoring with Business Intelligence, much as Web Analytics evolved toward, today (see http://blog.webanalyticsdemystified.com/weblog/2009/10/are-you-ready-for-the-coming-revolution.html )
Evolution of Social Media Monitoring as a field

2. Maturation of a common set of Social Media Standard definitions (i.e.: what is “engagement” and how is it measured? “What is a conversation, etc) for platforms and vendors – Scorecarding will evolve towards a unified dashboards. http://thisisbeta.influencescorecard.com/
Evolution of Social Media Monitoring as a recognized field

3. Today we’re locked into platforms and vendors even though they are pulling the same data off the web. In two years time it’s possible that we will be able to assemble and customize our own monitoring platforms with off the shelf, modular tools.
Open Sourced, modularized, Social Media Monitoring tools

Facebook to provide Behavioral Targeting and anonymous data, porting it into some Social Monitoring tools.
4. Radian6 and Alterian are beginning to receive Facebook data, expect much more data to be provided, including meaningful Influencer Mapping.
5. Real time alerts will be built into Facebook – much as they have now been built into Google Analytics.
6. Social Media budgets will be more closely aligned with Paid and Organic Search budgets, due to the inclusion of Social Search in Google and Bing.
7. Monitoring Analytics for Social Media will be funded as part of the marketing budgets in many corporations.

8. Currently, there is nothing in Social Media that matches WordTracker for SEO (or a dozen other tools) – Social Media is about conversations, not driven as much by keywords.
9. Today, Word Clouds are the closest thing to a keyword tool for Social Media – but, by 2011, a real set of keyword tools will be released that will allow for optimization of Social Media the same way Search Copy and Search Ads are optimized.
The first true “keyword tools” for Social Media will be released.

What else lies ahead for Social Media Monitoring – hard to tell
Inflection Point – once Social Media is fully accepted – will Social Media Monitoring be used as commonly as Google Analytics is used today?
Event Horizon - are we too close to the Social Media and Social Monitoring to fully predict where it’s going to be in the 2012?

Marshall Sponder
Webmetricsguru.com
Now.Seo@gmail.com
@webmetricsguru
Gtalk: now.seo
AIM: mlsiggaes
Skype: marshallsponder
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Future Of Social Media Monitoring

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