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Note: This document is intended for individual 
use. Electronic distribution via email or by post-ing 
on a personal website is in violation of the 
terms of use. 
Social media monitoring tools provide a structured – and in most 
cases turnkey – solution for organizations to measure the impact of 
social media. But research suggests that social media monitoring 
tools are largely being adopted in a handful of core industries such 
as retail, manufacturing, consumer packaged goods, hospitality, and 
ecommerce. Generally we see adoption among organizations with 1) 
consumer-oriented products and services and 2) a large population 
of target users online. Because of this, social media monitoring 
technology adoption has largely established traction in upper midsize to 
enterprise organizations with social media teams that have dedicated 
roles and responsibilities for social media monitoring. This Deep Dive 
will explore emerging trends in social media adoption, specifically 
five common barriers to adoption of social media monitoring tools. 
PERCENTAGE OF TOP PERFORMERS 
Entire content © 2014 Gleanster, LLC. All rights reserved. Unauthorized use or reproduction prohibited. 
2014 
About the Pie Chart 
The data presented in the chart is 
derived from the 2013 Gleanster survey 
on Social Relationship Management 
and the 2013 Gleanster survey 
on Social Listening. The surveys 
garnered responses from 314 and 247 
participants, respectively. The data 
presented in the body of this report 
reflects the findings from those surveys, 
including subsets of data taken from 
them and representing responses 
from across multiple industries. 
The data serves as the basis for 
this Gleansight Deep Dive, which 
provides analyst commentary 
related to a particular aspect of the 
topic. The objective is to provide 
additional perspective and illuminate 
certain key considerations regarding 
the implementation of the related 
technology-enabled business initiative. 
To learn more about Gleanster’s 
research methodology, please click 
here or email research@gleanster.com. 
Deep Dive 
Common Barriers to Social Media 
Monitoring & How to Overcome Them 
ANCHORING STAT 
64% 
reporting they are not as effective 
as they could be with social 
media monitoring efforts. 
The Rise of Social Media 
Roles on the Org Chart 
Before jumping into the five barriers, 
it’s important to highlight the emerging 
trends we have seen over the last 10 
years with respect to headcount. Many 
organizations learned early on that 
supporting social media was more 
than a part-time endeavor. What began 
as small investments in interns and 
marketing managers quickly blossomed 
into full teams with roles like VP of 
Social Media. But staffing these teams 
can be a challenge. It’s actually quite 
difficult to find experienced people who 
have proven strategies for driving return 
on investment in social media efforts. 
This also poses challenges with 
headcount structure. According to 
research from the Q2 Social Listening
Common Barriers to Social Media Monitoring & How to Overcome Them 2 
Top Performers Defined 
Gleanster uses 2-3 key performance 
indicators (KPIs) to distinguish “Top 
Performers” from all other companies 
(“Everyone Else”) within a given data 
set, thereby establishing a basis 
for benchmarking best practices. 
By definition, Top Performers are 
comprised of the top quartile of 
qualified survey respondents (QSRs). 
The KPIs used for distinguishing 
Top Performers focus on 
performance metrics that speak 
to year-over-year improvement in 
relevant, measurable areas. Not 
all KPIs are weighted equally. 
The KPIs used to distinguish Top 
Performers in this Deep Dive include: 
• Revenue growth 
• Active use of social 
media channels 
Note: This document is intended for individual 
use. Electronic distribution via email or by post-ing 
on a personal website is in violation of the 
terms of use. 
report, 8 out of 10 organizations support 
social media efforts in marketing. 
A full 67% of survey respondents 
actually had “Social Media Manager” 
roles on staff. But where do social 
media resources actually sit? 
There are strategic considerations, 
analytical considerations, technology 
considerations, and operational process 
components to social media. You need 
staff that can not only engage on behalf 
of the brand, but apply logic, analytics, 
and modeling to help justify the effort 
accordingly. 
From a technology perspective a 
centralized social media monitoring 
tool certainly helps by centralizing 
insights, routing action based on 
business rules, and standardizing 
reporting requirements. But when 
many stakeholders across leadership, 
marketing, and service may benefit 
from social data, a single platform can 
also be limiting in terms of supporting 
different social media roles and 
stakeholders. Generally, a core set of 
users have sufficient knowledge (or 
access) to the social monitoring tools, 
and reporting is limited to keywords or 
trends that are populated in the system. 
EMAIL 
Where’s R in the Social 
Media ROI Equation? 
Historically social media garnered 
considerable attention from the CMO 
and the CEO – especially after sites like 
Facebook and Twitter broke the 500M 
user mark. All things considered, social 
media remains a top two channel for 
engaging customers and prospects, but 
it’s still a difficult channel to measure. 
(See Figure 1.) 
Enter the value of social media 
monitoring tools. Most of the time, 
when we talk about ROI, we measure 
return as a tangible quantitative metric. 
But when it comes to social media 
monitoring, there are also qualitative 
considerations to factor into benefits. 
Here are common metrics used to 
measure the return on social media 
monitoring: 
• Engagement 
• Likes 
• Comments 
• Re-tweets 
• Sentiment 
• Web traffic 
• Impressions 
• Mentions 
100% 50% 0% 50% 100% 
Entire content © 2014 Gleanster, LLC. All rights reserved. Unauthorized use or reproduction prohibited. 
Top 2 channels used to engage 
customers & prospects 
In your opinion, is your organization 
capable of predicting return on 
investment in the following channels? 
EMAIL 
SEARCH 
SOCIAL SOCIAL MEDIA 
SEARCH 
Yes, All Respondents All Respondents 
78% 
84% 
22% 
92% 
75% 
68% 
Figure 1: No Predictable ROI from Social Media 
* Q4 2013 Gleanster Social Relationship Management Survey, n=314
Common Barriers to Social Media Monitoring & How to Overcome Them 3 
Note: This document is intended for individual 
use. Electronic distribution via email or by post-ing 
on a personal website is in violation of the 
terms of use. 
• Followers or fans 
• Revenue 
• Customer profiling 
• Satisfaction 
• Customer service 
• Customer satisfaction 
• Brand monitoring 
• Call volume (in Customer Service & 
Support) 
• Conversions 
• Lead capture 
• Sales ready opportunities sourced 
Challenges with Social 
Media Monitoring 
Generating actionable insights from 
social listening means being able to 
create structure around unstructured 
data. Of course, unstructured data 
accounts for the vast majority of content 
that resides in social networks, blogs, 
wikis, and ratings and review sites. All 
of the words and sentences (and all of 
the fragments of words and sentences, 
including the plethora of new-to-the-world 
Difficulty with Social Media Monitoring Tools 
Figure 2: Top 4 Challenges with Social Media Monitoring 
Difficult to analyze social data 
Resource skills 
Lack of time 
Entire content © 2014 Gleanster, LLC. All rights reserved. Unauthorized use or reproduction prohibited. 
abbreviations and acronyms) that 
people post and share and comment on 
can be said to fall beneath the umbrella 
of unstructured data. 
The challenge lies in being able to 
continuously mine the terabytes of 
unstructured data, separating relevant 
content from idle chatter, and generate 
insights that drive true business value. 
To that end, companies are working 
to implement the right enabling 
technologies, organizational resources, 
and business processes to capture, 
disseminate and act upon the insights 
that reside in social media. 
Some are also working to integrate 
and enhance social data with other 
consumer information, including CRM 
and other voice-of-the-customer data, to 
create more robust customer profiles. 
Capabilities around social data analysis 
are becoming increasingly sophisticated 
and widespread. Using both manual 
and automated techniques to look at 
“...unstructured data 
accounts for the vast 
majority of content 
that resides in social 
networks, blogs, wikis, 
and ratings and review 
sites.” 
52% 
72% 
69% 
78% 
0% 50% 100% 
Training 
All Respondents 
* Q4 2013 Gleanster Social Relationship Management Survey, n=314
Common Barriers to Social Media Monitoring & How to Overcome Them 4 
Note: This document is intended for individual 
use. Electronic distribution via email or by post-ing 
on a personal website is in violation of the 
terms of use. 
the subtle nuances of language, brands 
can readily identify emerging patterns 
and outliers, making it possible to find 
the comments that are truly relevant, 
put the conversations in context, and 
ultimately paint a more complete 
picture of what people are saying and 
why it matters to the brand. They can 
isolate conversations about specific 
topics and conduct searches that 
are sensitive to all the different ways 
people communicate online. Beyond 
generating actionable insights from the 
content itself, companies are becoming 
increasingly adept at being able to 
determine who, exactly, is doing the 
talking in terms of their demographic 
and psychographic makeup, and even 
their actual identities. 
Translating Social Media to 
Actionable Insights 
Social media monitoring tools are 
designed to offer turnkey insights 
around trends based on keywords, 
phrases and digital properties. In 
essence, the tools are sort of like your 
own personal search engine spider 
that crawls the web and looks for 
mentions of your brand, products, or 
other related keywords in your industry. 
They also connect with your social 
media properties to monitor what your 
Example Social Figure 3: Exam pMlee Sdoiac Aiacl tMioend Mia aAtcritxion Matrix 
Entire content © 2014 Gleanster, LLC. All rights reserved. Unauthorized use or reproduction prohibited. 
followers and customers say and allow 
you to drill down on aggregate trends 
and respond to individual engagement if 
necessary. 
But so what? So you are monitoring 
and you have dashboards that derive 
insights about who’s saying what. Now 
what? What do you actually do with 
these insights? For example, if you are 
monitoring sentiment and you find out 
that 60% of your customers say positive 
things about your brand, what do you do 
with that information? 
Recommendation: 
• This is where you need to lean 
on the different skillsets for social 
relationship management to help 
isolate ongoing action you can take 
based on insights in social media 
monitoring. Help isolate what to 
do and when in a methodical way 
to make social decisions scalable 
for the organization. It will likely 
require someone with proactive skills 
or even leadership skills to help 
prioritize efforts around social media 
monitoring. If, for example, you don’t 
have a strategic or analytical social 
media role in your organization, 
consider engaging a third party or 
agency on a short-term basis to 
Strategic Goals Monitor On Social Actions to Take 
Grow # of followers Monitor post to follower 
ratios and trends. 
Develop best practices for 
content and communications 
you can replicate to drive 
followers. 
Engage loyal customers Sentiment on customer 
communities / brand 
followers 
Promote loyalty program or 
capture email address form 
social users. Develop a 
special promotion or program 
to entice loyal customers to 
join. 
Etc.
Common Barriers to Social Media Monitoring & How to Overcome Them 5 
Note: This document is intended for individual 
use. Electronic distribution via email or by post-ing 
on a personal website is in violation of the 
terms of use. 
help provide best practices and 
prioritize key actions you will engage 
in with your social media monitoring 
efforts. You are essentially saying 
to yourself, if we see this, we will do 
that. Consider developing a very basic 
table or one-page overview of the 
top 3-5 ways your organization will 
be using social media insights. (See 
Figure 3.) Start by listing strategic 
objectives or goals for social media. 
Then determine how you would 
measure these goals and ultimately 
what you would do with the insights. 
This seems like a simple and obvious 
exercise, but analysis paralysis is a 
common challenge in social media 
monitoring tools. You can measure a 
lot – so much so that it can become 
difficult for social media resources to 
figure out which insights to take action 
on. Listing high priority objectives 
keeps users focused on a handful of 
core objectives that will help justify 
continued investments in social 
media. 
Resources lack the skills to 
act on social media data. 
Staffing knowledgeable experts is a 
challenge with respect to social media 
monitoring. More often than not, users 
who are trained in the social media 
monitoring tool are also the same users 
who are expected to react to issues. 
The thing is that social media is just a 
channel for interacting with customers, 
and the common denominator is 
the customer. You have a variety of 
different internal departments that are 
responsible for managing customers 
– product marketing, research and 
development, service, sales, marketing, 
and the executive suite all answer to 
the customer. Each possesses a unique 
skillset for ultimately attracting and 
retaining loyal customers. The question 
organizations really need to ask with 
respect to social media monitoring is 
Entire content © 2014 Gleanster, LLC. All rights reserved. Unauthorized use or reproduction prohibited. 
this: are you expecting social media 
resources to wear all of these hats? 
They can’t. 
Recommendation: 
• Distribute responsibility for monitoring 
social media and closing the loop. 
Social media monitoring tools allow 
you to create standard dashboards 
and business rules based on 
thresholds. Some tools even provide 
workflow to automatically alert users 
about relevant trends. It’s naive to 
assume the actual users of social 
media monitoring tools will be 
sufficiently capable of addressing all 
the issues that come up. Meanwhile, 
taking action on social media insights 
requires context – and that context 
is often unique to the different roles 
in the organization. For example, 
insights around product sentiment are 
best delivered to product marketing or 
product managers in the organization. 
Issues with service and support 
are alternatively best delivered to 
the customer service department. 
The nice thing about social media 
monitoring tools is that these users 
don’t actually need to interact with the 
social media monitoring technology to 
receive these insights. Simply alerting 
them to issues and putting a process 
in place for them to escalate further 
discovery if need be will help spread 
the burden of acting appropriately on 
different social media insights. 
Lack of time to manage 
social media monitoring. 
Let’s face it, social media isn’t the 
only thing you are measuring, and 
sometimes it feels like you are 
constantly focused on the next initiative. 
Who has time to stop and smell the 
roses? All too often, investments in 
social media monitoring tools seem very 
cool for weeks or even months when
Common Barriers to Social Media Monitoring & How to Overcome Them 6 
Note: This document is intended for individual 
use. Electronic distribution via email or by post-ing 
on a personal website is in violation of the 
terms of use. 
insights that were previously unavailable 
start to surface. But over time, users 
start to lose interest in the same old 
data week after week. This is where you 
can and should lean heavily on social 
media monitoring tools to do the heavy 
lifting for your organization. 
Recommendations: 
• Most social media monitoring tools 
will allow users to generate thresholds 
on performance indicators. Trends 
that stray above or below a standard 
deviation will trigger alerts to users 
that something is going on that 
demands their attention. That frees up 
time for users to focus on other issues 
with the confidence that they will be 
alerted in real time when something is 
actually worth exploring. 
• Create a standard set of dashboards 
for users. For each chart develop a 
one-sentence “statement of purpose” 
that outlines what the dashboard 
shows and how the data is to be 
used by the user. This is particularly 
effective for senior leadership. Make 
it super easy to derive insights. If 
you can’t say it in one sentence, it 
may be too difficult to act on the data 
and users won’t find it valuable. In 
any given day, we make the time to 
conduct activities that create value in 
our jobs. So issues with “not having 
time” are really just another way of 
saying you don’t see value in making 
the time. 
Ongoing training for social 
media monitoring. 
Social media monitoring is still an 
emerging discipline. There is actually 
a shortage of resources with the social 
and analytical skills necessary to have 
a meaningful impact on the effort. 
Moreover, it’s difficult to find and retain 
talent, which means you may actually 
be rotating resources into the role 
Entire content © 2014 Gleanster, LLC. All rights reserved. Unauthorized use or reproduction prohibited. 
frequently. So a plan for training users 
is actually critical to the longevity of the 
effort. Make no mistake, social media 
is largely a needle-in-the-haystack 
exercise. While aggregate trends are 
important, you also want to isolate 
customer satisfaction issues early, or 
in some cases engage an actual sales 
opportunity. 
Recommendations: 
• Standardize key insights as much 
as possible using reporting and 
dashboards in social media monitoring 
tools. The nice thing about social 
media monitoring is that you can 
customize reporting and insights in a 
standardized and scalable way. You 
can even automate report delivery to 
key stakeholders. The more people 
who receive social media insights 
internally and are familiar with the 
reports, the less critical it is to retain 
rock star social media monitoring 
administrators and team members. 
Problems typically arise when one 
or two internal roles have intimate 
knowledge of social and that’s it. 
Guess what happens when they 
leave. 
• Develop a universal social media 
policy for users to rapidly familiarize 
themselves with brand standards and 
strategic objectives for social media. 
The more you can standardize the 
effort, the easier it will be for users 
to train each other and get new 
resources trained on the initiative. 
• Spend a little extra money and hire 
someone with prior experience if 
you have to replace talent. One 
huge mistake organizations make is 
thinking that interns or fresh-out-of-college 
resources are sufficient for 
supporting social media efforts. They 
can do great work, but from a strategic 
perspective they probably lack context 
around the effort. If you want to 
“...social media 
monitoring tools 
allow users to 
generate thresholds 
on performance 
indicators.”
Common Barriers to Social Media Monitoring & How to Overcome Them 7 
Note: This document is intended for individual 
use. Electronic distribution via email or by post-ing 
on a personal website is in violation of the 
terms of use. 
move the needle with social media, 
you need strategic thinkers who are 
constantly willing to innovate and try 
new things. Skilled resources will 
mitigate the risk of constantly learning 
what doesn’t work. 
Deep Dive Talking Points 
• Consider developing a very basic table or one-page overview of the top 3-5 
ways your organization will be using social media insights. Start by listing 
strategic objectives or goals for social media. Then determine how you would 
measure these goals and ultimately what you would do with the insights. 
• Distribute responsibility for monitoring social media and closing the loop. 
Social media monitoring tools allow you to create standard dashboards 
and business rules based on thresholds. The nice thing about social media 
monitoring tools is that these users don’t actually need to interact with the 
social media monitoring technology to receive these insights. 
• Create a standard set of dashboards for users. For each chart develop a 
one-sentence “statement of purpose” that outlines what the dashboard shows 
and how the data is to be used by the user. 
• Standardize key insights as much as possible using reporting and dashboards 
in social media monitoring tools. Develop a universal social media policy for 
users to rapidly familiarize themselves with brand standards and strategic 
objectives for social media. The more you can standardize the effort, the 
easier it will be for users to train each other and get new resources trained 
on the initiative. 
Entire content © 2014 Gleanster, LLC. All rights reserved. Unauthorized use or reproduction prohibited.
Common Barriers to Social Media Monitoring & How to Overcome Them 8 
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Pleasanton, CA 94588 
For customer support, please 
contact support@gleanster.com 
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contact sales@gleanster.com 
Note: This document is intended for individual 
use. Electronic distribution via email or by post-ing 
on a personal website is in violation of the 
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Related Research 
Recently published research that may be of interest to senior industry practitioners 
include: 
Using Social Media to Improve Product & Service Launches 
Social Listening Gleansight 
Social Relationship Management Gleansight 
Influence Marketing CheatSheet 
Customer Journey Mapping 
How Top Performers Use Social Listening to Protect Brand Reputation 
The Gleanster website also features carefully vetted white papers on these and 
other topics as well as Success Stories that bring the research to life with real-world 
case studies. To download Gleanster content, or to view the future research 
agenda, please visit www.gleanster.com. 
About Gleanster 
Gleanster benchmarks best practices in technology-enabled business initia-tives, 
delivering actionable insights that allow companies to make smart business 
decisions and match their needs with vendor solutions. 
Gleanster research can be downloaded for free. All of it. 
For more information, please visit www.gleanster.com. 
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Common Barriers to Social Listening & How to Overcome Them

  • 1. Note: This document is intended for individual use. Electronic distribution via email or by post-ing on a personal website is in violation of the terms of use. Social media monitoring tools provide a structured – and in most cases turnkey – solution for organizations to measure the impact of social media. But research suggests that social media monitoring tools are largely being adopted in a handful of core industries such as retail, manufacturing, consumer packaged goods, hospitality, and ecommerce. Generally we see adoption among organizations with 1) consumer-oriented products and services and 2) a large population of target users online. Because of this, social media monitoring technology adoption has largely established traction in upper midsize to enterprise organizations with social media teams that have dedicated roles and responsibilities for social media monitoring. This Deep Dive will explore emerging trends in social media adoption, specifically five common barriers to adoption of social media monitoring tools. PERCENTAGE OF TOP PERFORMERS Entire content © 2014 Gleanster, LLC. All rights reserved. Unauthorized use or reproduction prohibited. 2014 About the Pie Chart The data presented in the chart is derived from the 2013 Gleanster survey on Social Relationship Management and the 2013 Gleanster survey on Social Listening. The surveys garnered responses from 314 and 247 participants, respectively. The data presented in the body of this report reflects the findings from those surveys, including subsets of data taken from them and representing responses from across multiple industries. The data serves as the basis for this Gleansight Deep Dive, which provides analyst commentary related to a particular aspect of the topic. The objective is to provide additional perspective and illuminate certain key considerations regarding the implementation of the related technology-enabled business initiative. To learn more about Gleanster’s research methodology, please click here or email research@gleanster.com. Deep Dive Common Barriers to Social Media Monitoring & How to Overcome Them ANCHORING STAT 64% reporting they are not as effective as they could be with social media monitoring efforts. The Rise of Social Media Roles on the Org Chart Before jumping into the five barriers, it’s important to highlight the emerging trends we have seen over the last 10 years with respect to headcount. Many organizations learned early on that supporting social media was more than a part-time endeavor. What began as small investments in interns and marketing managers quickly blossomed into full teams with roles like VP of Social Media. But staffing these teams can be a challenge. It’s actually quite difficult to find experienced people who have proven strategies for driving return on investment in social media efforts. This also poses challenges with headcount structure. According to research from the Q2 Social Listening
  • 2. Common Barriers to Social Media Monitoring & How to Overcome Them 2 Top Performers Defined Gleanster uses 2-3 key performance indicators (KPIs) to distinguish “Top Performers” from all other companies (“Everyone Else”) within a given data set, thereby establishing a basis for benchmarking best practices. By definition, Top Performers are comprised of the top quartile of qualified survey respondents (QSRs). The KPIs used for distinguishing Top Performers focus on performance metrics that speak to year-over-year improvement in relevant, measurable areas. Not all KPIs are weighted equally. The KPIs used to distinguish Top Performers in this Deep Dive include: • Revenue growth • Active use of social media channels Note: This document is intended for individual use. Electronic distribution via email or by post-ing on a personal website is in violation of the terms of use. report, 8 out of 10 organizations support social media efforts in marketing. A full 67% of survey respondents actually had “Social Media Manager” roles on staff. But where do social media resources actually sit? There are strategic considerations, analytical considerations, technology considerations, and operational process components to social media. You need staff that can not only engage on behalf of the brand, but apply logic, analytics, and modeling to help justify the effort accordingly. From a technology perspective a centralized social media monitoring tool certainly helps by centralizing insights, routing action based on business rules, and standardizing reporting requirements. But when many stakeholders across leadership, marketing, and service may benefit from social data, a single platform can also be limiting in terms of supporting different social media roles and stakeholders. Generally, a core set of users have sufficient knowledge (or access) to the social monitoring tools, and reporting is limited to keywords or trends that are populated in the system. EMAIL Where’s R in the Social Media ROI Equation? Historically social media garnered considerable attention from the CMO and the CEO – especially after sites like Facebook and Twitter broke the 500M user mark. All things considered, social media remains a top two channel for engaging customers and prospects, but it’s still a difficult channel to measure. (See Figure 1.) Enter the value of social media monitoring tools. Most of the time, when we talk about ROI, we measure return as a tangible quantitative metric. But when it comes to social media monitoring, there are also qualitative considerations to factor into benefits. Here are common metrics used to measure the return on social media monitoring: • Engagement • Likes • Comments • Re-tweets • Sentiment • Web traffic • Impressions • Mentions 100% 50% 0% 50% 100% Entire content © 2014 Gleanster, LLC. All rights reserved. Unauthorized use or reproduction prohibited. Top 2 channels used to engage customers & prospects In your opinion, is your organization capable of predicting return on investment in the following channels? EMAIL SEARCH SOCIAL SOCIAL MEDIA SEARCH Yes, All Respondents All Respondents 78% 84% 22% 92% 75% 68% Figure 1: No Predictable ROI from Social Media * Q4 2013 Gleanster Social Relationship Management Survey, n=314
  • 3. Common Barriers to Social Media Monitoring & How to Overcome Them 3 Note: This document is intended for individual use. Electronic distribution via email or by post-ing on a personal website is in violation of the terms of use. • Followers or fans • Revenue • Customer profiling • Satisfaction • Customer service • Customer satisfaction • Brand monitoring • Call volume (in Customer Service & Support) • Conversions • Lead capture • Sales ready opportunities sourced Challenges with Social Media Monitoring Generating actionable insights from social listening means being able to create structure around unstructured data. Of course, unstructured data accounts for the vast majority of content that resides in social networks, blogs, wikis, and ratings and review sites. All of the words and sentences (and all of the fragments of words and sentences, including the plethora of new-to-the-world Difficulty with Social Media Monitoring Tools Figure 2: Top 4 Challenges with Social Media Monitoring Difficult to analyze social data Resource skills Lack of time Entire content © 2014 Gleanster, LLC. All rights reserved. Unauthorized use or reproduction prohibited. abbreviations and acronyms) that people post and share and comment on can be said to fall beneath the umbrella of unstructured data. The challenge lies in being able to continuously mine the terabytes of unstructured data, separating relevant content from idle chatter, and generate insights that drive true business value. To that end, companies are working to implement the right enabling technologies, organizational resources, and business processes to capture, disseminate and act upon the insights that reside in social media. Some are also working to integrate and enhance social data with other consumer information, including CRM and other voice-of-the-customer data, to create more robust customer profiles. Capabilities around social data analysis are becoming increasingly sophisticated and widespread. Using both manual and automated techniques to look at “...unstructured data accounts for the vast majority of content that resides in social networks, blogs, wikis, and ratings and review sites.” 52% 72% 69% 78% 0% 50% 100% Training All Respondents * Q4 2013 Gleanster Social Relationship Management Survey, n=314
  • 4. Common Barriers to Social Media Monitoring & How to Overcome Them 4 Note: This document is intended for individual use. Electronic distribution via email or by post-ing on a personal website is in violation of the terms of use. the subtle nuances of language, brands can readily identify emerging patterns and outliers, making it possible to find the comments that are truly relevant, put the conversations in context, and ultimately paint a more complete picture of what people are saying and why it matters to the brand. They can isolate conversations about specific topics and conduct searches that are sensitive to all the different ways people communicate online. Beyond generating actionable insights from the content itself, companies are becoming increasingly adept at being able to determine who, exactly, is doing the talking in terms of their demographic and psychographic makeup, and even their actual identities. Translating Social Media to Actionable Insights Social media monitoring tools are designed to offer turnkey insights around trends based on keywords, phrases and digital properties. In essence, the tools are sort of like your own personal search engine spider that crawls the web and looks for mentions of your brand, products, or other related keywords in your industry. They also connect with your social media properties to monitor what your Example Social Figure 3: Exam pMlee Sdoiac Aiacl tMioend Mia aAtcritxion Matrix Entire content © 2014 Gleanster, LLC. All rights reserved. Unauthorized use or reproduction prohibited. followers and customers say and allow you to drill down on aggregate trends and respond to individual engagement if necessary. But so what? So you are monitoring and you have dashboards that derive insights about who’s saying what. Now what? What do you actually do with these insights? For example, if you are monitoring sentiment and you find out that 60% of your customers say positive things about your brand, what do you do with that information? Recommendation: • This is where you need to lean on the different skillsets for social relationship management to help isolate ongoing action you can take based on insights in social media monitoring. Help isolate what to do and when in a methodical way to make social decisions scalable for the organization. It will likely require someone with proactive skills or even leadership skills to help prioritize efforts around social media monitoring. If, for example, you don’t have a strategic or analytical social media role in your organization, consider engaging a third party or agency on a short-term basis to Strategic Goals Monitor On Social Actions to Take Grow # of followers Monitor post to follower ratios and trends. Develop best practices for content and communications you can replicate to drive followers. Engage loyal customers Sentiment on customer communities / brand followers Promote loyalty program or capture email address form social users. Develop a special promotion or program to entice loyal customers to join. Etc.
  • 5. Common Barriers to Social Media Monitoring & How to Overcome Them 5 Note: This document is intended for individual use. Electronic distribution via email or by post-ing on a personal website is in violation of the terms of use. help provide best practices and prioritize key actions you will engage in with your social media monitoring efforts. You are essentially saying to yourself, if we see this, we will do that. Consider developing a very basic table or one-page overview of the top 3-5 ways your organization will be using social media insights. (See Figure 3.) Start by listing strategic objectives or goals for social media. Then determine how you would measure these goals and ultimately what you would do with the insights. This seems like a simple and obvious exercise, but analysis paralysis is a common challenge in social media monitoring tools. You can measure a lot – so much so that it can become difficult for social media resources to figure out which insights to take action on. Listing high priority objectives keeps users focused on a handful of core objectives that will help justify continued investments in social media. Resources lack the skills to act on social media data. Staffing knowledgeable experts is a challenge with respect to social media monitoring. More often than not, users who are trained in the social media monitoring tool are also the same users who are expected to react to issues. The thing is that social media is just a channel for interacting with customers, and the common denominator is the customer. You have a variety of different internal departments that are responsible for managing customers – product marketing, research and development, service, sales, marketing, and the executive suite all answer to the customer. Each possesses a unique skillset for ultimately attracting and retaining loyal customers. The question organizations really need to ask with respect to social media monitoring is Entire content © 2014 Gleanster, LLC. All rights reserved. Unauthorized use or reproduction prohibited. this: are you expecting social media resources to wear all of these hats? They can’t. Recommendation: • Distribute responsibility for monitoring social media and closing the loop. Social media monitoring tools allow you to create standard dashboards and business rules based on thresholds. Some tools even provide workflow to automatically alert users about relevant trends. It’s naive to assume the actual users of social media monitoring tools will be sufficiently capable of addressing all the issues that come up. Meanwhile, taking action on social media insights requires context – and that context is often unique to the different roles in the organization. For example, insights around product sentiment are best delivered to product marketing or product managers in the organization. Issues with service and support are alternatively best delivered to the customer service department. The nice thing about social media monitoring tools is that these users don’t actually need to interact with the social media monitoring technology to receive these insights. Simply alerting them to issues and putting a process in place for them to escalate further discovery if need be will help spread the burden of acting appropriately on different social media insights. Lack of time to manage social media monitoring. Let’s face it, social media isn’t the only thing you are measuring, and sometimes it feels like you are constantly focused on the next initiative. Who has time to stop and smell the roses? All too often, investments in social media monitoring tools seem very cool for weeks or even months when
  • 6. Common Barriers to Social Media Monitoring & How to Overcome Them 6 Note: This document is intended for individual use. Electronic distribution via email or by post-ing on a personal website is in violation of the terms of use. insights that were previously unavailable start to surface. But over time, users start to lose interest in the same old data week after week. This is where you can and should lean heavily on social media monitoring tools to do the heavy lifting for your organization. Recommendations: • Most social media monitoring tools will allow users to generate thresholds on performance indicators. Trends that stray above or below a standard deviation will trigger alerts to users that something is going on that demands their attention. That frees up time for users to focus on other issues with the confidence that they will be alerted in real time when something is actually worth exploring. • Create a standard set of dashboards for users. For each chart develop a one-sentence “statement of purpose” that outlines what the dashboard shows and how the data is to be used by the user. This is particularly effective for senior leadership. Make it super easy to derive insights. If you can’t say it in one sentence, it may be too difficult to act on the data and users won’t find it valuable. In any given day, we make the time to conduct activities that create value in our jobs. So issues with “not having time” are really just another way of saying you don’t see value in making the time. Ongoing training for social media monitoring. Social media monitoring is still an emerging discipline. There is actually a shortage of resources with the social and analytical skills necessary to have a meaningful impact on the effort. Moreover, it’s difficult to find and retain talent, which means you may actually be rotating resources into the role Entire content © 2014 Gleanster, LLC. All rights reserved. Unauthorized use or reproduction prohibited. frequently. So a plan for training users is actually critical to the longevity of the effort. Make no mistake, social media is largely a needle-in-the-haystack exercise. While aggregate trends are important, you also want to isolate customer satisfaction issues early, or in some cases engage an actual sales opportunity. Recommendations: • Standardize key insights as much as possible using reporting and dashboards in social media monitoring tools. The nice thing about social media monitoring is that you can customize reporting and insights in a standardized and scalable way. You can even automate report delivery to key stakeholders. The more people who receive social media insights internally and are familiar with the reports, the less critical it is to retain rock star social media monitoring administrators and team members. Problems typically arise when one or two internal roles have intimate knowledge of social and that’s it. Guess what happens when they leave. • Develop a universal social media policy for users to rapidly familiarize themselves with brand standards and strategic objectives for social media. The more you can standardize the effort, the easier it will be for users to train each other and get new resources trained on the initiative. • Spend a little extra money and hire someone with prior experience if you have to replace talent. One huge mistake organizations make is thinking that interns or fresh-out-of-college resources are sufficient for supporting social media efforts. They can do great work, but from a strategic perspective they probably lack context around the effort. If you want to “...social media monitoring tools allow users to generate thresholds on performance indicators.”
  • 7. Common Barriers to Social Media Monitoring & How to Overcome Them 7 Note: This document is intended for individual use. Electronic distribution via email or by post-ing on a personal website is in violation of the terms of use. move the needle with social media, you need strategic thinkers who are constantly willing to innovate and try new things. Skilled resources will mitigate the risk of constantly learning what doesn’t work. Deep Dive Talking Points • Consider developing a very basic table or one-page overview of the top 3-5 ways your organization will be using social media insights. Start by listing strategic objectives or goals for social media. Then determine how you would measure these goals and ultimately what you would do with the insights. • Distribute responsibility for monitoring social media and closing the loop. Social media monitoring tools allow you to create standard dashboards and business rules based on thresholds. The nice thing about social media monitoring tools is that these users don’t actually need to interact with the social media monitoring technology to receive these insights. • Create a standard set of dashboards for users. For each chart develop a one-sentence “statement of purpose” that outlines what the dashboard shows and how the data is to be used by the user. • Standardize key insights as much as possible using reporting and dashboards in social media monitoring tools. Develop a universal social media policy for users to rapidly familiarize themselves with brand standards and strategic objectives for social media. The more you can standardize the effort, the easier it will be for users to train each other and get new resources trained on the initiative. Entire content © 2014 Gleanster, LLC. All rights reserved. Unauthorized use or reproduction prohibited.
  • 8. Common Barriers to Social Media Monitoring & How to Overcome Them 8 Headquarters Gleanster, LLC 4695 Chabot Drive Pleasanton, CA 94588 For customer support, please contact support@gleanster.com For sales information, please contact sales@gleanster.com Note: This document is intended for individual use. Electronic distribution via email or by post-ing on a personal website is in violation of the terms of use. Related Research Recently published research that may be of interest to senior industry practitioners include: Using Social Media to Improve Product & Service Launches Social Listening Gleansight Social Relationship Management Gleansight Influence Marketing CheatSheet Customer Journey Mapping How Top Performers Use Social Listening to Protect Brand Reputation The Gleanster website also features carefully vetted white papers on these and other topics as well as Success Stories that bring the research to life with real-world case studies. To download Gleanster content, or to view the future research agenda, please visit www.gleanster.com. About Gleanster Gleanster benchmarks best practices in technology-enabled business initia-tives, delivering actionable insights that allow companies to make smart business decisions and match their needs with vendor solutions. Gleanster research can be downloaded for free. All of it. For more information, please visit www.gleanster.com. Entire content © 2014 Gleanster, LLC. All rights reserved. Unauthorized use or reproduction prohibited.