‘Radian6 - Social Media Monitoring and Engagement Platform’

I am often asked what Social Media Monitoring is.  It is also given other names such as

- Social Media Metrics
- Social Media Measurement
- Social Media Analysis

and so on…

We like to call it ‘Social Media Monitoring AND Engagement’ as the monitoring element is not the end of the story.  If you wish to monitor mentions of your brand, product or service this is relatively simple to do.  A plethora of tools are available that can help you ascertain your ‘Mention Metrics’ but the real question is not just monitoring, it goes further, deeper and wider than that.  Engagement in the conversation is key.

So where do you start with social media monitoring and engagement.

1. Understand what it is you wish to measure

Many agencies will tell you to measure the amount of mentions for your brand and the sentiment towards it.  That’s a great thing to understand but there is more, much more, such as:

- Your competitors - what are they doing and saying, what are people saying about them.

- Your customers - they have a voice, and often want to be heard:

- Compliments
- Complaints
- Concerns
- Suggestions

- Your potential customers - who is your product relevant to? what would they be discussing, what pain does your product/service/application solve.

- Your content - Yes you should be searching for copyright infringement

- Your industry - you are not the only one doing what you do!

2. Select a Social Media Monitoring tool

Lots of tools exist and over a period of time we have reviewed most of them.  This is the part where we become very biased! 6Consulting are a UK focused Radian6 Solutions Partner, with that in mind we are of course going to recommend Radian6 as the platform of choice.  Things to remember when selecting a tool:

- Real time monitoring
Real time analysis of social media interactions is possibly the most important factor.  Social Media never sleeps, it is 24 hours a day 365 days a year.  If someone mentions my business, product. service or industry I want to know about it in real time, not tomorrow.  If using social media monitoring in a customer service capacity what good is finding a complaint made 24 or 48 hours earlier? you need to know immediately, have a process for engagement and a tool to monitor it.

- Feed Farm
How much of the Social Sphere does you social media monitoring tool search? and if it does not pick up something which you know exists you must have the ability to add that source to the system on the spot, not through a support system or by making a telephone call.

- The ability to determine sentiment - not computer generated but with human intervention!
Sentiment analysis has considerable debate surrounding it.  What is important to consider is ‘Context’. I can think of numerous sentences that a computer sentiment engine would determine as negative, but in my native tongue it means the opposite.  Computer generated sentiment analysis is not full proof, you must have the ability to alter it based on human interpretation.  As an example the word ‘BAD’ would be segmented as negative, how often have you heard it used in a positive way?

- Flexibility
Any good system will enable YOU to decide what to monitor, how to monitor it.  If you have a lightbulb moment and want to search on something you need the flexibility to do it, not have to pick up the phone and call your consultant!

- Reporting
It must have a reporting facility, you need to be able to export in PDF, CSV, XML or other.

- Web Based - SAAS (Software As A Service)
Self explanatory, you don’t want a system installed, you want to be able to access it from anywhere and let someone else deal with hosting, reliability, infrastructure.

- Consultancy Independent
Many applications for social media monitoring need a consultancy to do the work, when selecting a platform ensure the system has the potential to be ‘Consultancy Independent’ i.e you have the flexibility to set up and change how the system works and don’t require an outside source to do this.  Of course, some of you may not have the internal bandwidth/manpower/resource to monitor social media and you may decide to work with a consultancy and that’s fine, but have access to the system yourself as well.

That’s enough for you to digest in this post, part two in this series is going to take a look at the rules of engagement, your suggestions and comments are welcome.