8 steps to get the most from social media monitoring data

Regular readers of this stream or victims of my speaking events will know I have a low tolerance for anyone calling themselves a 'social media expert.'

I believe the medium and it's adoption is evolving too rapidly for anyone to claim to be a true expert, yet. Some people have a better insight on what is being delivered and some have mastered executing social media using the current knowledge pool, but experts, I'm afraid not.

 My view was reinforced by something I read recently in a industry body's monthly journal. A so called expert proclaimed that 'social media offers brands an opportunity to have a dialogue with its customers.' In isolation his statement is correct. In the context of an article that suggested that any brand not actively monitoring social media was some how irresponsible, is misleading.

 Monitoring social media is useful but not a panacea. Counting how many times your brand is mentioned in social media conversations adds little to the sum knowledge of an experienced marketer. Using un reliable automated sentiment scores even less.

 Analysing unstructured data does deliver valuable insight into the conversations customers want to have with you about your product or service performance. But so does analysing complaints, contact centre conversations, emails, analysing web traffic, focus groups, industry surveys, I can go on.

 Customer insight is key to making good marketing decisions. Social media monitoring and analysis plays an important role in developing that insight, but it is not the only data set available.

 To get the best from social media monitoring and analysis, brands need to

1. Analyse the verbatim of social media posts to identify topics important to you and your customers

2. Combine social media insight with all the other data you have collected into a single view of those topics

3. Differentiate what is trending in that data now and what are long term/fundamental themes using time series analysis

4. Prioritise what improvements can be tackled now according impact or available resources

5. Address those improvements

6. Monitor the improvements you have made

7. Monitor the low priority topics you are yet to tackle

8. Return to point 1

Amazing tech usage data from the UK's Ofcom that will affect how we consume the Olympics #2012

Countdown to London 2012

According to Ofcom research published this week, the UK's communications industry regulator, it is anticipated that at least 38 million adults in the UK will tune into the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games on TV.

One quarter of working people plan to follow the Games while at work, with 25% planning to watch or listen to the Games during office hours.

More than half (53%) of adults agree technology makes accessing coverage easier, with around one fifth (19%)  likely to follow developments on many different devices.

Social networking sites will also be used by some viewers to keep tabs on results and medal tables, with over one quarter (26%) of respondents claiming that social networking sites will make following the Games easier.

Beyond the Games

Text-based communications are surpassing traditional phone calls or meeting face to face as the most frequent ways of keeping in touch for UK adults.

The average UK consumer now sends 50 texts per week - which has more than doubled in four years - with over 150 billion text messages sent in 2011. Almost another ninety minutes per week is spent accessing social networking sites and e-mail, or using a mobile to access the internet, while for the first time ever fewer phone calls are being made on both fixed and mobile phones.

Teenagers and young adults are leading these changes, increasingly socialising with friends and family online and through text messages despite saying they prefer to talk face to face.

96% of 16-24s are using some form of text based application on a daily basis to communicate with friends and family; with 90% using texts and nearly three quarters (73%) using social networking sites.

Talking on the phone is less popular among this younger age group, with 67% making mobile phone calls on a daily basis, and only 63% talking face to face.

Traditional forms of communications are declining in popularity, with the overall time spent on the phone falling by 5% in 2011. This reflects a 10% fall in the volume of calls from landlines, and for the first time ever, a fall in the volume of mobile calls (by just over 1%) in 2011.

The change in communication habits reflect the rapid increase in ownership of internet-connected devices, such as tablets and smartphones - making access to web-based communications easier.

UK households now own on average three different types of internet-enabled device - such as a laptop, smartphone or internet-enabled games console - with 15% owning six or more devices.

The full Communications Market Report website including breakdowns by medium and UK region.

The power behind social media

The power behind social media is not the tools. It’s not the hash tag, the update, the Zuckerberg or the follow. It is the evolving way we are approaching collaboration.

eBay created trust mechanisms such as public feedback that played an important role in its growth. But fundamental to its success, and the success of all sorts of crowd purchasing platforms is the diminishing trust of big brands to offer a fair deal, and consumers own self interest driving them to collaborate in groups with people they largely know nothing about.

Self interest is driving us to work together to achieve a better deal. Not solving our community's needs, although for some of us that is an important outcome. Adam Smith understood this in 1776, Ricardo in 1809 and more recently encapsulated in popular culture with Gordon Gheko's proclamation that 'greed is good.'

We know inherently that the crowd is wiser than us, that's why we naturally follow it. But we follow it for us, not for the crowd's sake. Social media and the commerce that has become associated with it comes from our own self interest. Which when you think about about it, and the language social media 'experts' use, that is quite an irony.

Is your Exec becoming obsolete?

A friend of mine asked me how they should engage their senior leadership team is social networking. I said tell them that ‘if they don’t get on board they will be obsolete in 5 years.’

This is of course is as ridiculous as the claims made around the turn of the century about e-commerce. It has in fact taken 15 years for e-commerce to threaten high street spending. There is no such thing as a high street retailer or supermarket without an integrated e-commerce infrastructure.

Before e-commerce, the same was said of corporate e-mail.  IT Director’s, as they were called then, said ‘why would every member of staff in say a bank or insurance company need access to email?’

I once said the same about text messaging (SMS). ‘Why would I need a mobile phone that can send a text message when I have a perfectly good pager service?’

New communications tools come, and they go. The issue for executives that want to lead well performing organisations is not whether they should engage with new technologies, but how, and social media is no exception.

I don’t know an Exec that doesn’t use email, text messaging or e-commerce, even if it’s only to collect an e-ticket at the airport. Social media is more disruptive to organisations than any technology to date, because it is social. Social media is about people and groups of people interacting more openly than ever before, while the boundaries of the organisation blur.

So I do think that Execs that don’t get social media will become obsolete, if not in this decade, then the next one.