I agree. Sorry if my comment was too “black and white”, just wanted to give an additional perspective.

By the way I really like to post from Jeremy Owyang, dashboard versus GPS (http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/index.php?s=dashboard&sbutt=Go)

That’s to me what “pure monitoring” should be about.

Thanks

I agree with your approach, but I don’t think it’s an and/or situation that forces us to choose between two approaches.

These are two different processes we’re talking about, and they can work symbiotically if coordinated properly. I’m talking about tools that let you identify conversations and, in some cases, help with an analysis of them. While this post stopped there (because I wanted to explore perspectives on tools), the process doesn’t have to by any means.

Your approach, which is excellent, looks at one case from a marketing standpoint. However, if you look at a case from a communications standpoint and adopt an issues management-focused or customer support-focused mindset, then it’s important to be able to identify where people are talking about your product, company, brand, spokespeople (and so on) so that you can figure out whether/how to reach out and engage with them, and also to gauge trends in conversations. That’s the perspective from which this post comes – it’s not the only way to use social media as a marketing or communications tool, but it is a valid one.

Cheers

This is, to me, a non-social use of social media and my view is that companies will get limited benefits with such approach.

The issue is to define a real social marketing strategy and align ressources to reach a specific objective:

- what community do you want to listen to and engage with
- for what objective (mine for customer insights, adress customer satisfaction issues, buzz, promote your brand, investigate a specific question).
- what ressources can you put on this project, do your teammates already read blogs, participate in conversations, can you make them more “effective at doing it”, can you do this as a team ?
- what is the result you want to get, how do you measure it.

As an example, let’s say you want to build iPod accessories for teenagers. And you want to build an online focus group of teens with ideas about it.

Option 1: you start monitoring everything about iPod and teenagers… dauting task, no keyword will get you there. you’ll end up with untargeted conversations and mostly noise.

Option 2:

A- You focus first. you start gathering Blogs, social places where teenagers hang out, and you find out a handfull of blogs, forums that’s exactly what you’re looking for. Btw you’ll learn a lot in the process, and it can be done within days.
B- You extract the footprint of what a “teen place” is , you leverage connections between places (that’s our patented secret sauce) and you cut your slice of relevance. You’ll end up with a few hundreds of places along with their respective influence in THAT community, not overall.

C- Within this slice you look at what people say about iPod. Grab insights.
Your team starts targeting specific conversations; let’s say about iPod cases. you can buzz, become noticed, trustes … and build relations.

D- In our case, you spot 50-100 teens, with some audiance, and you’re offering them (via Facebook) to participate in the dedign/review of your next product. Your target is 25 people, that’s what you will measure your team against.

E- You can follow up with buzz or even an advertising campaign, highly targeted that will leverage the community input.

It’s not going to tell you the overall sentiment about the iPod – (It can tell you how influential teens see it so ).

But it’s giving you much more actionable insights and connections. That’s to me what social marketing is about.

Although we should be using all of these tools, I think that the most value comes from ones that are conversational and near real-time. Summize is at the top of the list — we’ve found it to be invaluable for support, feedback, etc. Another great tool missing from the list is FriendFeed, which is helpful because it aggregates a lot of the activity from others in addition to the native activity.

Cari
Buzz.io