Investing in a social media monitoring tool is on the agenda of almost every organization these days, not surprising since more and more organizations understand the importance of monitoring their online brand mentions.
Consequently, there is a sea of vendors fighting for a piece of the growing Social CRM (SCRM) landscape. Briefly, these can today be categorized into 1) Monitoring tools 2) Publishing tools 3) Analytical tools. Most tools do a little bit of all three, but some are pure players are focusing in only one of these three categories.
I hooked up with Social media monitoring expert Bryan Tookey , COO of social media monitoring company Brandwatch, for an in-depth look at social media monitoring. Bryan has an infectious passion for what he does, and he’s really committed to make Brandwatch the best social media monitoring tool on the market. I thus dared to challenge Bryan on some hard topics.
I invite you to watch the webcast below where I ask Bryan things like:
- How do you build your case for social media monitoring?
- How can you effectively use monitoring data for marketing campaigns?
- What are the trends within the next 2-5 years for social media monitoring tools?
- What are the difficulties social media monitoring tools with fetching data from Facebook?
So how and where do you start when trying to justify Social media monitoring? The first thing Bryan suggest is to self-assess your own brand: are you a brand that people will talk about?
"We often find ourselves being asked that question from companies where social media monitoring isn’t appropriate for, where the volume of mentions is generally pretty low or the product is really boring. Not to be mean but look at toothpaste, for example, no one talks about toothpaste brands."
When it comes to building the case, Bryan suggests tracking the amount of mentions you have over time and comparing with your competition. You also need to look at the qualitative side of the mentions: "Take an hour a side and read 100 of your mentions and see what categories they go into, you can often pre-guess most of these being customer service, product and advertising."
Bryan definitely thinks the number of mentions on social media will increase in the future. It’s a technology driven phenomenon that comes from everyone having a smartphone in their pocket, facebook accounts and twitter profiles. The blogging community long ago outdrew the journalist community.
Social CRM tools has a bright future ahead
We’ve outlined the current state of Social CRM tools being either focused on publishing, monitoring or pure analytics. Bryan confirms that looking at how to merge these three into one tool is definitively something that lies in the pipeline, he won’t yet, however, reveal exactly how it will look.
As a user myself, I’m very keen on having all these three instruments into one tool. This makes sense when you have workflow management between multiple users, when you tag customers/prospects and when you want to export and work with the analytical data. Today, there’s no tool that can do all of these three things very well, although some tools are pretty close.
There are easier things to monitor than Facebook
Monitoring Facebook has been a well debated topic lately in industry forums and blogs. Of course private data is private, and it will remain so. But when fetching the data from Facebook’s API, it seems like there are many variables that decide the outcome of the data, these being if the account you use have friends and what friends, what language setting it has, etc. I think there is still a lot of unlocked potential in increasing the quality and amount of data coming from Facebook.
Are you monitoring your brand on social media? What tools are you using? Who in your organization is responsible for the monitoring? I’m keen on hearing from you on these questions, as well as any other you may have.
Monitoring social media is not just a marketer's job! Get REAL insights and actionable strategies for weaving social media into your customer service function at the Call Center Summit!
Call Center IQ advisory board member Joakim Nilsson originally featured this video on his blog: http://www.joakimnilsson.com/tools-2/video-social-media-monitoring-marketing-tips-for-2011/