Ventured down to Webtrends to catch a web 2.0 monitoring platform presentation and panel discussion yesterday – Three Tools To Monitor & Measure Social Media: PositivePress, ScoutLabs and Radian6.
Scout Labs Monitoring Platform Demo
A graph depicting the recent social media dispute via keywords “Kevin Smith”
Another graph showing the flip side of the conversation via keywords “Southwest”
The Panel Fielding Questions From The Audience
The Future of Social Media Monitoring
The panelists had stated that social media monitoring is still a very young field still in its infancy and projected to grow significantly in 2010. I decided to kicked off the panel by asking the first question about the future of social media monitoring. One of the things the panel responded with was that the companies are trying to solve the listening problem of pulling in comment threads and establishing meaningful “conversation depth” and placing them meaningful / actionable context.
I guess the best analogy to use here is that the web 2.0 monitoring platforms can see how wide the river is (say 2000 blog posts are posted) but when it comes to measuring the depth of the conversations (say there are 600 comments on one particularly lively or heated blog or post) they cannot see how deep it goes. So though monitoring platforms can understand how wide the river is, but they cannot measure the depth of the water / undercurrents / velocities in particular social locations or always see exactly what really lies just beneath the surface. Basically there is currently a limitation to measuring conversation depth and context the platforms are hoping to tackle. I am sure that a technical part of the problem is so many commenting system types in different formats and programming languages.
Limits to Monitoring Technologies
There are technological limits to what the information can be pulled from the public Internet and how it can be interpreted or displayed by a machine (even programs designed to learn through human interactions). One person asked the panel about video monitoring and the overwhelming responsewas that speech to text conversion “is just not there” and tech challenges still impede effective monitoring of video. It is amazing how far the social web has come, but the sense that I walked away from the panel with was that we still have a long ways to go.
Memorable Quotes
“We don’t have developers, we have engineers.” – Chase
“(When selecting a monitoring platform) think about what your time is worth and that will be your surest guide.” – Margaret
“It’s scalable up the wazoo!” – Chase
Dispelled Myths / Random Knowledge
“100% accuracy on sentiment is a lie.” – Margaret
“The availability of twitter data is actually very limited. Nobody really gets the full feed except for some of the giants like Google or Bing.” – Margaret
“The auto-industry is and has always been dominated by forums (by social media type)” – Margaret
Zero Tips & Takeaways
- Don’t think of it as “social media monitoring” (very narrow description) think of it as real-time marketing intelligence.
- Know what your time is worth and the client budget + strategy. How much time us being devoured by chasing social media metrics or the number of social mentions per day will help you to decide which platform + price point is right for your organization.
- Don’t trust any one social media monitoring product or platform, always have a backup or some form of redundancy for listening.
- Social media monitoring is new and sometimes pretty murky but hopefully we will get more clarity this year as tools.
- If you have peers who are using monitoring platforms ask them for references and trade offs
Disclosure – This article has been postdated to the date it was drafted
