Social Media Monitoring Must Evolve
Posted by Jonathan Block on Wed, Jan 20, 2010 @ 09:22 AM
Social media monitoring is a popular topic these day, and deservedly so. From our perspective monitoring is one of the four cornerstones of an effective social media strategy, which consists of Monitoring, Engagement, Awareness and Demand Creation. But where vendor functionality regularly outpaced a B2B organization's skills and process capabilities, users are finding such monitoring tools lacking in some key areas. This is not unlike the the marketing automation platforms (MAP) space; it's only in the last couple of years that B2B marketers have evolved to the point where they can take full advantage of MAP capabilities.
Let's look at what we're hearing from clients on two fronts:
- Integration: Again, not unlike MAPs, ease of integration of social monitoring platforms with other enterprise systems will become a differentiator for many customers. And we mean true integration, not just importing and exporting data. If you're only interested in tracking mentions, keywords and sentiment, as well as some indication of your level of engagement, then a standalone monitoring tool will be sufficient. But most B2B organizations look beyond communication goals to social media marketing, which requires tracking all customer and prospect interactions (what we call "following the social media breadcrumbs"), and integrating this data into MAP and CRM systems is critical. This explains why social tools are finding their way into such systems, either through partnering, acquisition, or the vendors building such functionality themselves.
- From reporting to analytics: Most clients tell us that social media monitoring platforms are good at reporting what people are talking about, where they're doing that talking, and offering some indication of sentiment, but many B2B marketers are disappointed at the lack of analysis they get. To be fair, agencies are still a significant user base of monitoring tools and many provide this analysis as a value-add to their customers, but more and more marketers are interested in leveraging these tools themselves. If monitoring solutions don't provide the analysis customers need, they'll need to integrate with systems that can such as a web analytics or business intelligence solution.
Social media monitoring is a still a relatively new market and growing pains are to be expected. While some users complain about usability issues (whither the concept of robust online help?), B2B organizations realize they must continue to evolve from a skills and process perspective to best take advantage of social monitoring tools. But these solutions also need to evolve from data aggregation to a solution for insight and action, providing not just activity information (read: who, what and where) but some indication of the impact these activities.
How would you like to see social media monitoring evolve?