We’ve met with several companies in the Social Media Monitoring space. After seeing their products, I can definitely see some value in what they provide. There are certain actions that are clear cut from this type of data, while other actions are not as clear to me.

All social monitoring technologies pull data from popular social sites, such as Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, MySpace, etc. Since they all pull data from the same sites, they more or less show the same data. One area of differentiation some companies have is the ability to also pull data from unstructured data sets. For example, a company like Social Seen could also pull in information from your corporate systems, like your CRM, Call Center, website and suggestion boxes.

These Social Media monitoring tools classify each “conversation” in a positive, neutral, or negative fashion using standard language protocols. If the word “good” is used, they assume it’s positive, and if the word “bad” is used, they assume it’s negative. If it doesn’t contain a positive or negative lean, they classify it as neutral. This challenge of accurately classifying conversations is a common problem in the social monitoring space. Recently, I learned that the Hebrew University developed a technology that has the ability to analyze conversations for positive or negative sentiment.  When tested against human reviewers, their algorithm agreed with humans nearly 80% of the time. So, there is hope that this common problem will be solved.

Actions That Are Clear

It’s obvious to me that if a company is using a social media monitoring tool, one worthwhile action to take is to reach out to those who have had negative experiences with your brand. Not only do you have a chance to turn this customer’s negative experience into a positive one and to hopefully retain them as a customer, but you increase the likelihood of that customer posting a positive message next time.

Another use of social media monitoring is to use the negative comments about your product or brand and address those at a more macro level. By this I mean that you can incorporate negative feedback into future product development or to create whole new business lines to address overarching complaints in the marketplace.

Many social media monitoring technologies allow you to monitor more than just your brand. Therefore, one smart action to take is to monitor your competition.  Understanding your own competition from their customers’ point of view can create opportunities for yourself to either expose your competitions weaknesses or capitalize on these weaknesses and turn their customers onto your company product offerings.

Actions That Are Not So Clear

Do positive comments equal profit? By this I mean does increasing the number of positive sentiment on the web increase profitability, and if so, is it quantifiable and by how much? If you could clearly state that for every positive comment, I get X return in profit, then one can easily determine how much time and how many resources should be dedicated to increasing positive sentiment on the web. But I’m not aware of social monitoring technologies being able to quantify this, so it is impossible to determine how much money and man power should be invested on generating positive sentiment.

If you could determine the ROI of positive sentiment, how do you generate more positive sentiment? Ideally, positive sentiment is driven by you providing a great product and service that people want to tell others about. The only way outside of creating great products and services to generate positive sentiment without using unscrupulous methods, like hiring cheap labor overseas to post positive things about you, is to ask your customers to post things on your behalf. “If you like our new X, please become a fan of our Facebook page.” Twitter’s new advertising model is another method that could potentially help you drive positive sentiment by paying for it.

There’s no way to track the influence of positive sentiment at the customer level. For example, if a person was in the market for product X and went to Amazon to read comments about the product, and while reading the comments learned about product Y, then went to a search engine looking for product Y, clicked on an ad and bought product Y, all a tracking technology would know about this customer is they clicked on an ad for product Y and converted. There is no tracking today that would also incorporate that the user read a positive review beforehand. Without this type of tracking, social media will never be able to be accurately valued, and therefore, it is impossible to know how much time or resources to dedicate to these types of endeavors.

I am by no means an expert in social media monitoring or in executing social media strategies. I am an expert in advertising analytics and quantifying the value of trackable steps in a purchase path. I am sure there are other actions that one can take from the data that social media technologies provide today, and I would love to hear what those are. Please feel free to share those below and hopefully change my opinion on social media monitoring for the better.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 15th, 2010 at 1:47 pm and is filed under All Blogs, Analytics, News, Optimization, Social Media, What's New?. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.