Take-aways from Monitoring Social Media Event
Wednesday, November 18th, 2009
Yesterday Nick Owen (Data Planner) and Mike Phillips (Social Media Executive) went to Monitoring Social Media in town yesterday. Here’s their key take-aways:
Alan Moore (Not the Watchmen author) but Author and Founder of SMLXL: Spoke for a long time without saying much and was really just setting the scene. He said that Social marketing intelligence is the third dimension of consumer insight, which is nice.
Neville Hobson (Head of Social Media WC Group): People are discussing and creating brands without the brands involvement or even knowledge. Ethical behaviour is a key part of maintaining trust. Authenticity through transparency. Provided a line to a best practice in disclosure when engaging with consumers.
Antony Mayfield (VP, Head of Global Media, iCrossing). Spoke about Howard Rheingold and his media literacies .
Said its important to focus your attention on certain areas of social media, because you can’t look at everything. Spoke about network theory and how it needs developing and said that monitoring wasn’t just about real-time but that it was also about long-term and monitoring how it develops and is influenced.
Ann Longley (Digital Strategy Director, MEC) Stressed that listening is the first piece of data to educate the organisation. Reputation is based on: Strength of network/fanbase, Market leadership, Responsiveness and Product and service innovation. A new approach to this would be: Listen, Plan, Respond and Evaluate.
Tim Callington (Comms Consultant, Edelman) Referred to Kipling quote in terms of it being important to measure ‘What, Who, How, Where, Why and When’ of social media.
Katy Howell (Managing Director, Immediate Future) Presented well with some interesting slides but didn’t really say anything of import.
Celia Pronto (Marketing Director, STA Travel) This was one of only two case studies, in what was claimed to be a social media campaign. It wasn’t really. They created a non-corporate, consumer friendly site where consumers could interact with the consultants that STA travel use to explore and research their product. It was nice CRM with a social twist.
Next came a Panel discussion: The ROI of social media monitoring. The team succesfully avoided answering the question, ‘How do you measure ROI for social media?’ but didn’t manage to sell themselves well and belittle a number of people from the audience who asked questions. The only thing said of any use was by David Cushman (Managing Director 90:10 Group) who used the term ‘aggregated attention’ as a way of expressing measurement and reach of social media activity, but didn’t properly define it.
ROI could be hard of soft. Cash, or Reach, Sentiment change, Level of engagement, Better customer service, the cost of not engaging with customers with complaints and queries.
Lunch was good. Nick had a bowl of turkey and mushroom stroganoff stuff with very tiny potatoes. Mike had fish and profiteroles.
Paul Alexander (CEO, Beyond Analysis) was next and he was beyond dull. Apparently they do data mining and he said it might be a nice idea to use Social Media data in that. What a revelation! What he did say though, which was quite interesting, was that selling social media to stakeholders is about placing it in the context of other data sources used to inform marketing decisions and customer service.
Giles Palmer (Founder and Managing Director, Brandwatch) Nothing said which we didn’t already know, but conveyed with great energy and wit. He’s grown a moustache for Movember and someone tweeted that he looked like Magnum PI. One thing he did say was that SEO is very important for social media monitoring but that it doesn’t focus on the long-tail but social media tracking tools need to and that is where the spam lives. That should improve in time, but the ability to gauge sentiment probably won’t. Still needs human interaction.
Brad Little (Director, Industry solutions online, Nielsen) Echoed the point about the importance of human interaction. He also stressed that Quantative measures alone are not a measure of influence, we also need to understand what people are saying. Numbers are not insight. He stressed the importance of combining research methodologies with social media monitoring tools - Listening and Asking. Strange he should say that seeing as that’s what his company does…
Next was a panel discussion of what’s wrong with social media monitoring tools. I actually felt a bit sorry for Giles and Brad at this point with the panel and audience taking the opportunity to vent their frustrations with various aspects of different packages. Until one bright spark pointed out that they’re a damn sight better than what they haven’t got.
Lastly was Robin Grant (Managing Director, We Are Social) who presented a case study of their work with Skype. The key thing here was the creation of a conversation platform for handling customer service inquiries and complaints. They recognised that while these sorts of conversations happen across the broad spectrum of social media its not always appropriate or practical to handle them where they originate and that its much better to direct people to a hub. He also explained the monkey butler approach with We Are Social starting the activity, then training Skype staff before handing it over to be done internally.
So, main things learnt from the day were:
1. Value of off-the-shelf conversation platform for engaging with customers
2. SEO can’t be separated form social media
3. There is a natural progression for social media engagement (Agency > Training > Goes internal with consultancy retained by agency)
4. Social media tools have a lot of issues but better than nothing or free tools and still need human analysis contribution. Investment needs to be made in skills as much as tools
5. Numbers alone do not = insight.
