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Posts Tagged ‘monitoring’

Should you let social media conversations direct your business?

11.11.22

Here’s a question for you: Should you let conversations in social media direct your business?

If you’ve worked in the social media space, that seems like a pretty straightforward “yes”, right? I mean, we’re always talking about how listening and responding is critical.

What if we ask the question a couple of other ways:

Should you always let conversations in social media direct your business?

Should you let individual conversations in social media direct your business?

The answer isn’t quite as simple now, is it? All of a sudden, we’re facing potential (hypothetical) situations where, every time someone doesn’t like something, you change things around to make them happy, or where a single outspoken voice gets priority over a potential majority who could want something else.

All of this goes to say that while listening is central to social business, you need to frame the decisions you make based on that listening appropriately.

Let’s take two examples:

Customer Support

I’m of the general mindset that you should try to help every customer who needs support (you don’t tell your call centre not to answer calls from certain customers, do you?). But what about when a customer asks for something that, if applied to everyone who asked, just wouldn’t be feasible? Do you change your company’s approach based on one person’s request?

If you’re a B2B company with only a few major customers, then perhaps you do.

If you’re a B2C company with hundreds, thousands or millions of customers, though, then probably not – you’d end up bankrupting your company.

Product and Service Insights

Let’s say you’ve got your listening program set up. Do you listen to each individual opinion that is out there on the web?

Of course not. You’d end up constantly in reactive mode, responding to customer “insights” with no overarching strategy and no ability to plan for the future.

Approach Insights Strategically

I think the time where large companies will begin to take a more strategic approach to leveraging social media for insights is fast approaching. Note: I’m not talking about losing the human touch when it comes to interacting with people, and I’m not talking about removing flexibility from front-line social media staff, but more in how companies approach distilling social media conversations into useable takeaways.

Take Insights in Aggregate

When my team tells me that “there’s a lot of conversation online” about topic X, my first response nowadays is “how much”? If the answer is just a few mentions, then my response is to keep monitoring, see if things escalate and begin to prepare in case they do. If the answer is “hundreds” or “thousands” of conversations, then we know we need to react immediately.

The same applies to mining for insights. Taking individual pieces of feedback can be useful for illustrative purposes, but unless you’re just looking for ideas to inspire (or to pass the hours and hours of free time you clearly have), you need to step up a level and identify the key trends.

Test Your Assumptions

Tom Webster gave a great presentation at BlogWorld recently where he talked about the need to “do your own work.” In this context, it means not just assuming that something you’ve gleaned from other people is correct – you need to test it for your business.

Tom also made the great point that social media are themselves a biased source of data, so to be sure of your insights, you need to test them outside social media.

What does this mean? It means that you need to move from shift from reacting to customer feedback to testing to ensure that the reaction to those reactions would benefit your business. Of course, once you implement changes subsequently, you should be monitoring for the reaction to those changes, developing more insights, testing… and so on.

My hope is that the time of the “let’s all sit around a campfire and pretend that businesses need to respond to every single piece of feedback” people is coming to an end, and that the time for strategic insights is upon us. Some social media practitioners are ready for this; others aren’t.

Ask yourself: where do you sit?

Posted in: monitoring, social media

12Comments

5 Steps to Thinking More Socially About Communications

10.11.22

Like it or not, “digital” is becoming a part of more and more marketers’ jobs. The implications of this are broader than just tacking-on another channel to an existing marketing plan – developing digital approaches require a shift in mind-set from traditional channels, whether they’re owned, earned or paid.

Here are five ways to begin to shift your thinking from traditional communications to social communications.

Think “inbound” alongside “outbound”

Your new social hub, or your Facebook Page, or your engagement plan may be the nice, glamorous part of your approach to social media, but be careful not to completely neglect incoming information in favour of outbound messages.

Just as most companies invest resources in media monitoring, online monitoring should be a core component of any companies’ online activities nowadays. Social media is allowing more and more people to connect and talk about the things that they care about, and to do so in a place where you can hear them. This has three big implications:

Self-identified audience – if people are talking about your company or brand, they’re doing the equivalent of raising their hand as people who care. It’s a marketer’s dream – in the past we’ve had to use a shotgun to do a rifle’s job. Nowadays, the rifle can work.
Identify problems early – by monitoring what people are saying online, you can identify many issues in niche groups before they escalate to a broader audience. Because you can identify them, you can mitigate or prepare for the consequences and you can learn from them.
Weather vane – monitoring lets you see the reactions to your activities in real-time, and to adjust them. So, if your approach isn’t resonating, or is being received negatively, you can adjust. This means that, rather than a fire-and-forget approach, or a ready-aim-aim-aim-aim-fire approach, you can adopt a ready-aim-fire-aim-fire-aim-fire approach that is more likely to generate good results.

Think long-term, not short-term

Social media outposts don’t come with a built-in, ready-to-go audience – you need to build your community over time. However, that’s not the way that many people have been taught to think. Marketing campaigns are often built around short-term microsites, campaign-focused landing pages and one-off ads. That approach is ineffective in social media.

Launching a Facebook Page or Twitter account for a campaign then turning it off at the end of the campaign is akin, in traditional digital terms, to building an email list with a campaign then just deleting it once the campaign is done. It’s a waste. What’s more, you’re creating social media scorched earth as people who chose to connect with you may feel used.

Organizations often cited as leading the way in social media are launching properties and maintaining them over the long-term. The Starbucks Facebook Page, for example, has over 18 million fans. These didn’t just appear overnight (disclosure: Starbucks is an Edelman client). In comparison, the final episode of LOST drew 13.5 million people – five million fewer. While Starbucks isn’t a realistic comparison for most brands, the way they’ve built their fan base over the long-term is cause to stop and think about the “disposable property” approach.

Adjust your approach to measurement

Marketers and communicators have long suffered with poor measurement approaches based largely on guesswork. Online activities (first one-way, now two-way) let us draw a much more direct line back to our objectives… and we should take advantage of that.

In a world where social media activities are fighting for a piece of the same pie that everyone else is eating, we do need to demonstrate results. Yes, it’s frustrating that social media seems to be held to a higher measurement standard than other forms of communications, but it’s the newest and as such people aren’t yet sold on its effectiveness.

One big challenge right now is that traditional marketers are seeking to apply traditional metrics to this new paradigm. CPM metrics, for example, may make sense when you pay for the media and control every letter in your ad. However, when you’re dealing in earned media over which you have zero control of words, sentiment, audience or placement, not every eyeball is equal. Is it a good thing if Engadget posts a piece that rips your new product launch a new one? The CPM metric would say yes. So, not every eyeball is even a good thing. Quality measures like sentiment, message and link inclusion and conversions for other goals become important.

Integrate your channels

The lines between communications disciplines have been blurring for some time now. Social media takes that to the next level. I wrote about the interplay between different forms of media late last year, and my colleague David Armano’s diagram of the intersection of these media types (below) illustrates it well.

Social media doesn’t fit into a neat silo. You’re operating with a mix of on-domain owned properties, outposts on third-party sites, engagement on other sites, paid ads and online earned media. This puts social media approaches at an uncomfortable intersection for people who would like to put “social” in its own bucket, or within an existing one.

That means your internal departments need to play nicely with each other. It means the agencies supporting you need to, too.

Get used to two-way conversations

Over the course of its history to-date, communications has evolved from one-to-one, to one-to-many, to many-to-many. Use of social media tools brings with it expectations. So, the question becomes not whether to respond, but how, because if you stick your head up, vomit your messages all over anyone who will listen, then disappear, you’re not going to convince anyone. You’ll end up with a bunch of people asking you questions with no response. If social media monitoring, as Marcel Lebrun says, is the equivalent of answering the social phone then not responding is like answering the phone then sitting on the line in silence.

When you publish new content, monitor regularly for reactions and respond to them. When you ask a question on Twitter, respond to people who reply. When you comment on a blog post, subscribe to the comment stream so you can see if anyone posts follow-up questions.

Two-way interaction is here to stay. The toothpaste isn’t going back in the tube. To ignore this is to put your head in the sand.

What else?

I’m sure these five shifts in thinking are just the tip of the iceberg. Do you agree? What else would you add?

Posted in: social media, strategy

Tags: measurement, monitoring, social media, strategy

10Comments

A Closer Look At The New Radian6 Engagement Console Features

10.11.17

Earlier this week I posted a review of some new features Radian6 has incorporated into its online dashboard. Today we’ll take a look at some additions rolled-out to their Engagement Console tool.

The changes to functionality are four-fold:

Extensibility
User roles and permissions
Improved search functionality
Shared macros

Extensibility

The latest version of the console allows developers to build new extensions into the console through the Engagement Console API. This might take the form of additional commands, built-in searches, or web pages pulled into new windows.

User roles and permissions

One of the new changes I touched on in the last post was the addition of “Super User” roles. Super users have an additional screen in Radian6′s online dashboard where they can see users and profiles, and edit each.

The inclusion of Super User functionality in the Engagement Console brings with it the ability to define “workspaces” and “permissions” for other users.

Workspaces

Workspaces are the areas where the stacks (columns) in the consoles are displayed. Super Users can set the base Workspaces for sets of users so, for example, certain users would always see certain topic profiles in their console.

Permissions

Permissions let you control how the console is configured for other users. As Ryan Strynatka, Director of Product Management, put it to me:

“You can turn various components and capabilities on and off. For example, want to remove the ability to launch a personal FB stack and restrict the ability to respond on Twitter stacks – you can now do that. In fact, you can completely pare down the EC you so that it looks and feels more like a desktop widget – just content flowing in without workflow capabilities and so forth. In the Agency world, this might be interesting for routing content to customers.”

Improved search functionality

The new console incorporates three new elements into the existing search functionality:

Creation of topic stacks by keyword group: allowing more targeted search results to be displayed (you could, for example, focus in on company and brand mentions rather than broader industry conversation).
Filtering of search results by custom date: a very useful feature, especially for people working on social media audits and reports after the fact – in the past the lack of this feature rendered the console largely unusable for this purpose.
Twitter profile search: Improved integration with Twitter allows you to quickly search for Twitter user names and have user profiles pop up within the console. Useful for folks engaged in real-time monitoring.

Macro sharing

Right from the beta version of the Engagement Console, the inclusion of easy-to-create macros has been a winning feature, allowing users to easily recreate previously time-consuming tasks, and apply them to multiple posts, with the click of a button.

With the new version of the console, you can now share your macros with other members of your team, or with members of specific projects – bringing a new element of consistency to macros which might otherwise be intimidating for less-advanced users.

Summary

When I first reviewed the Engagement Console earlier this year, it provided an excellent tool for engagement from an end-user perspective. These recent changes add additional benefits from the user side, but also from an enterprise viewpoint.

All-in-all, this is a very useful set of changes. Combined with the enhancements to the Radian6 dashboard, this represents a useful step forward for Radian6 which benefits both end users and enterprise administrators alike.

What would you like to see?

The Radian6 team will undoubtedly keep rolling-out adjustments over time. So, what other changes would you like to see?

Posted in: monitoring, social media monitoring, tools

Tags: monitoring, Radian6, social media monitoring

1Comments

Digging-in to the new Radian6 Dashboard Improvements

10.11.15

Last week, Radian6 announced a whole raft of improvements to their platform and to their engagement console. Our team uses Radian6 for many clients, and I’ve used the tool for several years now, so I thought I’d take some time to dig into the updates and distill the key improvements for you.

This time around: changes to the Radian6 dashboard.

Key Changes

Refresh button
Keyword proximity searches
Enhanced query support
Better special character support
Percentage change analysis
Quick search function
Super user functionality
Google Analytics integration
Enhanced security

Here’s what they mean to you…

Refresh Button

This feature – a really simple one – is one I’ve been asking for for months now. Nothing flashy; just the ability to refresh widgets by hitting a button instead of waiting for the next refresh or going into the widget settings, toggling a setting then coming back out. Yes, it should have been there already. Yes, I’m happy that it’s there now.

Keyword Proximity Searches

Proximity searching is a logical addition to solve the problem of irrelevant and spam search results. A “proximity slider” lets you choose the maximum distance that can separate your keywords, up to a maximum of 20 words.

Enhanced Queries

Radian6′s lack of boolean or boolean-esque support has been a pain point for me over the last few years. As a result, creating queries has been a time-consuming beast. The latest update simplifies things – instead of creating:

Term A AND Term B; or
Term A AND Term C; or
Term A AND Term D

you can instead easily create the equivalent of:

Term A AND (Term B OR Term C OR Term D)

Better Character Support

47 additional special characters are now recognized. The main implication: you can specifically identify @replies and hashtags; especially useful when searching for a hashtag that may double as a regular word.

Percentage Change Analysis

In a nod to people using Radian6 to produce regular reports, you can now include a comparison of time periods within your topic analysis widgets.

Quick Search Function

Radian6′s new ‘quick search’ functionality lets you both filter your existing River of News widgets quickly, and quickly create new widgets from the left-hand sidebar. Useful for following a hunch around emerging conversation trends.

Other changes:

Super Users – power users who can set other users’ permissions (from read-only accounts to folks with full) and create new accounts.
Google Analytics – adding Google Analytics to the suite of integrations that Radian6 enables. Given the number of sites that use Google Analytics, this could be helpful for many companies.
Enhanced Security – SSL-enabled login.

Conclusion

Overall, this is an excellent set of new features from Radian6. There’s nothing ground-breaking in here, but for regular users of the dashboard, there are a host of features that should make their lives incrementally easier.

In particular, the query improvements and user administration enhancements should make those overseeing monitoring accounts happy. Meanwhile, the special character recognition, refresh button, percentage change analysis and quick searches will help those using the system on a day-to-basis.

(Coming soon: a look at the changes to the Radian6 engagement console)

Posted in: monitoring, social media monitoring, tools

Tags: monitoring, social media monitoring, tools

1Comments

Sysomos Acquired By Marketwire

10.07.05

In recent months we’ve seen several interesting moves within the social media monitoring/social CRM space.

Company	Acquired by	Date
Techrigy	Alterian	July 2009
Filtrbox	Jive Software	January 2010
Buzzgain	Meltwater	February 2010
Biz360	Attensity	April 2010
DNA13	CNW Group	April 2010
Scout Labs	Lithium Technologies	May 2010

(Note: CNW Group is a 76design client. Thanks to William Johnson for the DNA13 pointer and Steve Dodd for the Buzzgain tip.)

Now we’re seeing another significant player in a similar move, as Toronto-based Sysomos is acquired by news wire service Marketwire.

First reported by the Startup North blog, the news was later confirmed by Sysomos, although their blog comment and tweet have both since been deleted. So, while this is still – for now – a rumour, given that these confirmations were initially posted by the company (I saw the blog comment before its removal), I’m inclined to believe the reports and that a formal announcement is imminent.

Update: Sysomos has confirmed the acquisition. CEO Nick Koudas said in an email to me today:

“We are excited and we are looking forward to continue our innovation and enhance our creative product line.”

Sysomos

Sysomos offers three core services:

Sysomos MAP – a web-based, enterprise-level social media monitoring tool
Heartbeat – a web-based social media monitoring and engagement dashboard (see my review of Sysomos MAP and Heartbeat)
Audience – a sales- and marketing-focused tool to help measure ROI and optimize marketing and community engagement

Sysomos has been noticeable in recent months with a series of smart awareness-driving tactics. In fact, they were featured in the New York Times just a day before this news. They’ve also made some interesting moves towards drawing a line between social media activity and business results with the introduction of their Audience product. It’ll be interesting to see whether/how Marketwire plans to factor this into its product lineup.

Implications

The recent spate of acquisitions isn’t surprising to anyone watching the space. Indeed, analysts like Altimeter’s Jeremiah Owyang have been commenting on the consolidation trend for a while. As Ray Wang suggests, expect to see more of this kind of activity in the coming months with other companies such as Alterian, BuzzGain, Cymfony, Radian6, Viralheat and Visible Technologies .

This particular acquisition is particularly interesting, as the acquisition is by a company on the “traditional media” side of the fence. This should help Marketwire to more effectively compete with wire services such as PR Newswire (in the US) and CNW Group (in Canada), which already feature monitoring solutions:

Strengthens existing monitoring services

While PR Newswire already offers a social media monitoring service, Marketwire’s monitoring offerings are currently more limited. With social media monitoring being a common “toe in the water” for many companies as they experiment with social media, this service is becoming a must-have for traditional monitoring companies.
Strong analytics

Monitoring solutions by themselves are useful, but the “clippings-style” approach to social media monitoring is really just the beginning. By acquiring a solution that allows users to do a deep dive on online conversations, Marketwire is adding a useful tool to its arsenal, and one that it doesn’t just need to white-label from other providers.
User-friendly interface

Sysomos offers one of the most user-friendly web interfaces of the monitoring providers – a big bonus for less tech-savvy clients.

I’m looking forward to more information on this move soon, and to monitoring further activity in this space over coming months.

In the meantime, what do you think of this move?

Posted in: social media monitoring

Tags: Marketwire, monitoring, social media monitoring, Sysomos

62Comments

Sysomos Audience Moves Towards Measuring Social Media ROI

10.06.15

Social media ROI is a hot topic right now, as social media begins to (slowly) mature. The purists who insisted that the conversation alone was and end, rather than a means, are diminishing in volume and a more rational, approach is emerging balancing the revolutionary aspects of social media with those that are simply evolutionary from existing business practices.

One area in particular which is fast-evolving is social media monitoring (my ex-colleague Michael O’Connor Clarke quipped last week that there’s probably a micro-industry dedicated to watching it).

After several weeks of back and forth, and rescheduled meetings, I finally managed to get a demo of Sysomos Audience last week. I came away impressed.

Placing a Value on your Visitors

Sysomos Audience is an addition to the Heartbeat monitoring and engagement tool. At first glance it seems similar to Google Analytics in nature – in fact, I previously under the incorrect impression it simply connected social media traffic to web analytics. However, Audience really focuses in a different direction, providing tools that should pique the interest of your sales, marketing and community management folks alike.

Audience tracks visitors to your site alongside their previous web activity, and helps to determine whether each person is a real lead or is just browsing. It does so by examining peoples’ previous web activity, including competitors’ websites, blogs, social networks and so on. In doing so, it determines whether your visitors are qualified leads or just browsing. For example, people are much more likely to be serious sales leads if they’ve been researching other competitive products first than if they’ve just clicked through from a random site.

Critically, Audience also lets you assign a dollar value to visitors based on their visits to competitor sites, to help determine the ROI of your social media activities. It does so by letting you assign values for visits to different areas of your site (those key to your sales funnel might have a higher value, for example) and other factors. In doing so, you gain a relative value for each visitor to your site. This might seem familiar to web analytics (Google Analytics lets you assign goal values, for example) but this goes above and beyond by incorporating activities outside your own site, and by aggregating values per user.

This has implications for several functions within companies:

Sales
Community management
Public relations

Sales

Sales folks – wouldn’t you like to know who your most valuable leads are right at the beginning of the process, so you can prioritize them accordingly? While Audience generally only provides generic tracking information for most people, if you hook the system into any web forms you have, it can link their name and information into their activities (note: you’ll likely need to amend your privacy policy in order to do this). Right now, the system doesn’t hook into Salesforce but according to Sysomos co-founder Nilesh Bansal, that functionality is on the way.

Community Management

Just as Audience lets you track your most valuable visitors, it also lets you identify the sites that are the source of the most valuable traffic to your website. In the demonstration I saw, for example, I saw that while TechCrunch drove a lot of traffic to Sysomos, the traffic from other sites on a per-user basis was actually worth more to them. For community managers, pulled in a thousand directions, this can be valuable information to help them prioritize their focus.

Public Relations

The idea of being able to place a value on the traffic from a piece of coverage is mouth-watering to me. For one, it gives a great answer to the “what’s the ROI of this pitch” question (which even traditional media relations hasn’t solved yet) but also it helps you to figure out who you need to build relationships with and on whom you should focus your pitching. Of course, it doesn’t remove the hands-on targeting and tailoring work that goes into each project, but this kind of data would still be immensely valuable.

Privacy Concerns?

The only question that worried me during the demo I received revolved around online privacy. How does Audience determine which sites people have visited recently? Every site I’ve seen reviewing Audience – from TechCrunch to ReadWriteWeb to Web Metrics Guru – have wondered but no answers are forthcoming. While Sysomos doesn’t currently pull user profiles in, it’s only a small step from there to linking a Twitter or Blogger profile into things and having a complete record of your visitors’ browsing habits. That’s hypothetical but a little concerning as I’m sure they’ll experience pressure to add that feature.

Sysomos’ Nilesh Bansal wouldn’t shed any light on the question when I spoke with him. He told me they don’t look at cookies, but that Audience uses a piece of JavaScript code which you embed on your site and correlates that with their social media monitoring database. So, how do they know people have been on a competitor’s site? It sounds a little dubious to me. As long as they don’t shed any insight into this, people will continue to wonder what’s going on.

Exciting Potential

Setting aside the privacy concerns for a moment, Audience really does have a lot of potential, especially if you’re already a Sysomos client. The product is still in closed beta testing for now and Sysomos hasn’t announced pricing but, like Radian6′s engagement console, this looks to be a differentiating addition to Sysomos’ portfolio of services. I do think they need to answer the privacy questions, though.

What’s your take?

Posted in: measurement, monitoring, social media, tools

Tags: measurement, monitoring, social media, Sysomos

16Comments

Altimeter, Web Analytics Demystified Release New Research On Social Media Measurement

10.04.23

Measurement is one of the most interesting areas within social media right now. Not only is effective measurement critical to demonstrating results in an emerging space, but sophisticated measurement can offer valuable insights to shape communications strategies, both online and off; proactive and reactive. This challenge is being compounded as the social web expands beyond companies’ websites and individual networks with Facebook’s new announcements.

While smart people like Katie Payne have been working hard to nail down effective measurement approaches, there’s a long way to go as social media continue to shift and evolve. So, a 26-page white paper released by Altimeter Group and Web Analytics Demystified, with the input of some of the major players in this emerging industry, offers some much-needed insight into the problems and potential solutions we’re all facing in this area.

The paper offers steps for companies to follow in their measurement efforts:

Revisit tradition for solid innovation: Follow traditional business and communications best practices – align success metrics with business objectives and measure against those
Make learning your primary goal: Make continuous improvement a key goal, and take advantage of the opportunity to gain insights from your customers
Define requirements first, then select vendors: Develop your measurement approach THEN figure out which company’s solution to use
Develop your social media measurement playbook: Get the organization on the same page with regard to goals, objectives, expectations and actions of your social media efforts. Then implement the technologies and processes you need to measure against that
Make our measurement framework your own: Adapt generic models to suit your organisation, as there’s no “one size fits all” solution

The paper also provides a simple framework for considering the key performance indicators (KPIs) that you may want to consider in your efforts:

This is a rudimentary list of business objectives, but provides a useful starting point for discussion. Like Shel Holtz, I’d like to see more discussion of this in a future iteration.

The KPI discussion, meanwhile, is excellent, providing simple explanations of each metric along with practical ways to measure against them and pointers to vendors who can help organizations in measuring against those factors.

In summary, this white paper provides some extremely valuable insight into some of the measurement context, challenges and solutions companies face. It’s worth a read for the business objective and KPIs section alone. I should also note that unlike many other similar organizations, Altimeter is providing this white paper free of charge (thanks!), and for that reason I’m able to embed it below.

If you haven’t checked the paper out yet, I strongly recommend you do so. You’ll certainly get more than your money’s worth

What do you think of the report?

Altimeter Report: Social Marketing Analytics

Posted in: best practices, measurement, social media, social media monitoring

Tags: measurement, monitoring, social media, social media monitoring

22Comments

Shift From Self-Driven To Issue-Driven Social Media Listening

10.03.31

Are you focusing on the wrong things in your monitoring program?

Yesterday, I was impressed to discuss the following assertion from a company we’re hoping to work with, regarding their monitoring program (paraphrased below):

“We don’t just want more reading material; we want something that adds value to what we do.”

This one statement evolved into a valuable conversation on the difference between self-focused monitoring and a more holistic program focused not just on the organization but also on the issues that matter more broadly to the company.

The nature of self-focused monitoring

It seems obvious, but there’s an important distinction here. Many organizations focus on what other people are saying about them without broadening their focus to the things that really matter to them:

How many people are talking about us?
Are they saying nice things?
Where are they talking?
What kinds of things are they associating with us?
Are our organization’s key messages mentioned?

Benefits of self-focused monitoring

These programs are often used as yardsticks for determining the success of online programs and there’s certainly value in that. Self-driven monitoring can help both from a communications and a broader business perspective, for example:

Catch emerging issues related to your company or brands
Identify opportunities for product/service improvement (valuable research for product teams)
Spotting pent-up demand or frustration early
Provide an additional channel for proactive customer customer service
Assist with the evaluation of communications programs

Despite these benefits, though, self-driven monitoring only scratches the surface of the potential for monitoring.

Opportunities beyond “self”

Still, there’s so much more to online monitoring than this. Monitoring and listening programs focused purely on a company can miss much of the potential insight for the company.

What about emerging industry topics?
What about discussion of your competitors?
What about monitoring for hot-button media issues?
What about looking for what key voices (policy makers, for example) are saying about your industry?
What about broader consumer insights related to your market?

There’s a wealth of valuable information being discussed online nowadays; the limits of the potential usefulness are to a great extent only defined by your internal resources (time and people or, if outsourced, budget). With the right program, you can move from reactive, passive evaluation to proactive, real-time insights and actionable take-aways.

The most comprehensive monitoring programs define their sphere of conversation broadly, then dig into specific aspects for actionable insights – research, leads, media opportunities and so on. It is programs such as these, which can constantly evolve to incorporate emerging topics and trends, that realize the full value of the powerful tools out there (Radian6, Sysomos, Alterian SM2, Scout Labs etc) for mining these online conversations.

So, ask yourself: is there room to evolve the way you approach your social media monitoring?

Posted in: social media, social media monitoring

Tags: monitoring, social media monitoring

18Comments

Radian6 Launches Real-Time Monitoring And Engagement Console

10.03.10

Radian6 has announced a new tool that has the potential to be a paradigm shift in how companies manage their social media monitoring programs.

The Radian6 Engagement Console combines two of the best tools out there – Tweetdeck and Radian6 – in an Adobe Air-based desktop tool. In doing so, the console makes radical improvements to the workflow process for Radian6 users. We’ve been test-driving the console in our office for a little while now, and I’ve been very impressed by the utility – and future potential – of this new tool.

The Low-Down

Some of the key features of the console:

Supports multiple Twitter accounts and Facebook, so you can combine your personal and professional engagement – posting and replying on both of these services
Allows you to set up “stacks” (as they call columns) from multiple Radian6 profiles, based on numerous criteria
Incorporates Radian6′s search functionality, pulling from searches covering blogs, Twitter, Google Buzz, forums, Flickr, YouTube and more
Far, far faster than the Radian6 web interface – both in terms of interaction but also refresh frequency, which can be as frequent as every 30 seconds
Supports conversation threading – a feature missing from Radian6 previously
Built-in URL shortener
Allows team-wide collaboration on engagement, as you can see updates from colleagues in near-real time and can view previous conversations with people
Resizeable columns (hear that, Tweetdeck??)
Incorporates all of Radian6′s workflow features within the tool
Allows you to create custom macros for bulk management of posts.

Check out Radian6 CEO Marcel Lebrun discussing the console in this video:

Workflow At Your FingerTips

These last two features are central to the console’s value. One of the biggest barriers to using the full potential of the Radian6 workflow has, in the past, been the slow speed of the web interface and the 15-minute refresh cycle within that interface. This, combined with the preference people for tools such as Tweetdeck for their own personal posts, makes it hard to ensure that messages all flow through one system from a workflow perspective. This all changes with the Engagement Console.

The Engagement Console is intended for use as a front-line tool. In contrast, the Radian6 web interface is built much more around its reporting functionality. By taking the popular layout of Tweetdeck, building-in Radian6 data and workflow, and also essentially co-opting many of the features that have made tools like Hootsuite and CoTweet popular for team-based approaches recently, Radian6 is releasing a tool that has the potential to dramatically ease the monitoring and engagement process for companies.

Of course, the web interface remains for report generation purposes – this tool is intended as an addition, not a replacement.

Macros are your friend

The macro feature is another very cool addition. Macros aim to streamline your interactions by letting you automate recurring tasks. So, if you have a type of post that frequently comes up, you can set a standard way of dealing with them, save it as a macro and then click one button to handle all of that post’s workflow actions.

Confusing? Imagine a macro for product complaints, for example. You could create a macro that sets sentiment to ‘negative’, sets the post classification to ‘product complaint’, adds a post tag of “support” and assigns posts to a particular team member. Then, when future complaints arise, you can click the macro and all of that is taken care of in one click.

Bottom line

The Radian6 Engagement Console really could be a game-changer in their market. It combines the powerful search, workflow and team functionality of Radian6 with an easy-to-use interface which is a front-line person’s dream come true. Given all of the relatively similar social media monitoring services out there, this tips the balance. Once this tool rolls out fully (it’s in private beta until April), I see no reason why companies looking for both social media analytics and real-time engagement wouldn’t choose Radian6.

Now, where’s that mobile app…?

Posted in: monitoring, social media monitoring, tools

Tags: monitoring, Radian6, social media monitoring

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Review: Sysomos Social Media Monitoring Tool

09.11.30

I’ve explored many social media monitoring tools over the last few years. This week I added to the list when I received a demo of Sysomos – a Toronto-based company launched in 2007. Along with Radian6 and the Alterian-acquired Techrigy, Sysomos is one of the well-known players in the monitoring landscape right now.

Sysomos’ offerings are split into two products (see a detailed breakdown on the Sysomos website):

Maps – Sysomos’ core tool – offering unlimited search queries and analysis on its database of conversations.
Heartbeat – Sysomos’ enterprise-level tool, incorporating search, analysis and workflow management around specific topics.

I’ve structured this review to around the major features I look for in a monitoring tool:

Search
Analysis features
Workflow
Price

Search

Historical search

Both Sysomos tools query the same database of conversations, which stretches back to 2006. All users can run queries on this entire database (historical data in the Heartbeat tool comes with an additional cost), which solves a problem I’ve frequently encountered in the past – being able to look back in time to run baseline and historical searches for new clients.

Boolean

Sysomos also allows the creation of boolean searches – a feature I welcome as it allows the creation of complex queries very easily.

Social networks

To my surprise, Sysomos didn’t seem to search the full breadth of social networks we’ve come to expect. When we asked about searching MySpace, for example, we were told that we could find MySpace if we searched for “specific users.”

With that said, Sysomos does include public Facebook pages and groups in its search results. Other tools (Techrigy, for example) do this too, but it’s a useful feature that’s becoming more important as Facebook continues to dominate other social networks (in North America, at least).

Organization

One area in which Sysomos does fall slightly short of its competitors is in the organization of queries. Whereas Radian6 allows hierarchies of queries, so you can separate searches for your competitors from those for your brand, for example.

Analysis features

Interface

The interface on Sysomos products was one of the big eye-openers for me. Long frustrated with interfaces that limit your options, I was pleased to see a very user-friendly dashboard which allows easy on-the-fly customization. Need to narrow your search duration? Just click and drag over a time period on a chart and it adjusts.

Sentiment

Sysomos comes with automated sentiment analysis. I’m a long-time cynic when it comes to this kind of feature. Companies seem to view it as almost a must-have nowadays but I’m not sure why when no-one is able to produce an accurate tool. Sysomos claims its sentiment analysis is 80 per cent accurate, but I’m afraid a 20% error margin is not good enough for me.

With that said, you can manually edit the sentiment assigned to results, and even a mere 80 per cent accuracy does mean less work for the person analyzing the data, so while I don’t consider the sentiment analysis a differentiator, it’s still handy.

Filtering

The filtering system in Sysomos is very simple and flexible. You can layer new filters on top of your search at any time, and it’s easy to add those filters onto your main search permanently if you want to.

Segmentation

While the deep mining doesn’t seem to be quite as powerful as in some other tools, the breadth of options is wider – allowing deeper analysis on geography and a limited demographic breakdown (based on user-disclosed information).

Text analysis

While word clouds are run-of-the-mill nowadays, Sysomos goes one step further through what it calls its “BuzzGraph”, which shows the associations between common words in a search. I found the context provided by BuzzGraph to be a welcome addition to the rudimentary text analysis provided by most services.

Workflow

Maps, as a search/analysis focused offering, doesn’t include a workflow system. Heartbeat, however, does. It incorporates the standard features we’ve come to expect, including task assignments. However, from the brief look I got, it doesn’t seem to go as far as Radian6′s workflow tool, which incorporates deeper categorization of posts, tagging and real-time email alerts.

Price

Sysomos doesn’t come cheap. However, it’s roughly comparable with its competitors.

The Heartbeat tool starts at $500 per month, plus a $500 setup fee. For that you get a limited number of searches and access by up to five people. For double that fee, you can double the number of queries and get access by an unlimited number of people.

The Maps tool, meanwhile, comes at a flat rate of $2,500 per month. That allows unlimited searches on all data going back to 2006, and unlimited access, making it a potentially cost-effective tool for agencies servicing multiple clients.