Social Media Is A Complex Thing

Though we throw the phrase ’social media’ around as though it were a clearly defined thing, the reality is that social media is an extremely complex mix of sources, platforms, authors, responders and more. Each has its own unique characteristics- Twitter is very different than a blog which very different than a Ning network which is completely different than a wiki or YouTube. Yet each is defined as social media because they all provide a place users to post and respond to content.

Social Media Monitoring Is A Complex Process

My background is in social media monitoring and measurement tools, specifically SM2 from Techrigy. SM2 is a complex piece of software that performs, IMHO, far better than most of its competitors. However I do hear all the time from users about issues like repeat results, spammy results, irrelevant results, etc. That’s because the complexity described above means that a software designer must build a collection system that is tailored for each different kind of social platform and they must also create universal metrics specifications that make meaningful comparisons between sources possible. And they must continually adapt these designs as source providers change their software, servers and APIs, among other things.

Understanding Your Keywords Is The First Step

Another factor in the quality of the results from social media monitoring searches is the user’s expertise. These searches are built on keyword phrases that must refined to eliminate irrelevant or spammy results. The use of Boolean operators like AND and OR, excludes and avoiding very general phrases like “Google” is critical to getting relevant and useful results. If you’re searching Delta faucets for instance, you’ll want to exclude references to rivers and airlines. You might want to do a search on phrases like “delta” and “faucets” to find results that specifically include both keywords together. Unless you have experience in SEO (search engine optimization) and SEM (Search Engine Marketing), you probably haven’t spent time refining the keywords associated with your business, brand or reputation. In the new world of social media marketing, developing a sophisticated keyword phrase list is the first marketing activity you should be pursuing.

Social Media Analysis and Metrics Help You Understand Massive Numbers of Conversations

Another problematic aspect of social media monitoring is the sheer quantity of results you may discover. That’s why I am so positive about SM2- it offers the most powerful analysis and sorting tools available. When you have hundreds of thousands or millions of results from a major brand search, understanding what they mean is a daunting task, especially if you’re tasked with explaining the results to a group who are not familiar with the implications of social media. The metrics tools enable you to make estimations of demographics like gender, age and geo-location, of tone, sentiment and emotive content, of buzz by date or individual keyword and more. You can extract themes, see how social contributors tagged their own posts, measure the relative reach of the sources and make comparisons.

The sorting tools are equally important. You can sort by source (Twitter, Ning, Blogs, Wikis, etc.), by keyword phrase, by any metric category, by things like Political, Legal or Religious and by any custom category you create. Those sorted results instantly are parsed and charts built to analyze just that subset of the total results. Want to know the sentiment of female Twitterers using a single keyword phrase? No problem.

Look for Indications of What People Think Rather Than 100% Accurate Measurements

All of these metrics and analysis tools are indicators, not 100% accurate. The software depends on the quality of information provided by the source user. It only collects publicly available information and makes best guesses on what it means. Thus, things like sentiment analysis are guesses based on negative or positive terms in proximity to your keywords. Because software cannot (regardless of what semantic software people tell you) understand irony and other complexities of human communication, no one can do accurate sentiment analysis without humans reading and marking the results, a very costly option (marking individual results is an option in SM2).

Becoming A Social Media Monitoring Expert Now Puts You In A Leading Edge Position

Social media monitoring and analysis is critical to your social media outreach campaigns. While imperfect, it is being improved constantly and will be your primary marketing toolset in the very near future. My advice is to skip the freebie tools out there because they simply cannot provide any degree of accuracy or capture all the relevant conversations. Buy the tool that works for you and become a power user or assign that role to someone in your group. You’ll automatically be at the forefront of this new marketing paradigm.