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As a marketer and dedicated online blogger, writer, tweeter and so on, you come to realize that you need to know what people are saying about your brand and maybe you’ve decided that you need to be monitoring social media online. But where do you go for this service? Google offers search, alerts, and now they’re adding Twitter results to their mix. But is that good enough? If you’re going to invest time in monitoring your brand then, in my opinion, you need to use a professional social media monitoring tool. Why? Because there are so many advantages that Google can’t begin to offer and never will.
For example; a search in Google brings back widely varying results and the further you go into the search results pages, the less relevant the results are. By using a dedicated social media monitoring tool the results come back relevant and clean from spam and duplicates. Another point to consider is that whenever you do a search in Google it depends on which Google database your search is hitting and what algorithm is being used that day – three months later the same search could bring back different results, making it impossible to accurately benchmark and analyze the data in any structured format. Some social media monitoring tools have stored and indexed historical results ensuring an accurate repeated search. Further to this, Google Alerts are limited to blogs and are not comprehensive at all – most media monitoring services gather from blogs, comments, forums, wikis and multimedia services like YouTube – relying on Google Alerts is only providing a small part of a much bigger picture.
Finally, Google doesn’t provide a dashboard to aggregate the gathered data where it can be reviewed and analyzed in order to gain insights and realize the potential of the results. Analyzing your data is the most valuable aspect of social media monitoring and without it your search efforts would be wasted! You can see volume by day, volume over time, the most frequently used words in the search, as well as sentiment and tone!
How does this affect your project in terms of time & resources? A real life example comes from a global PR agency. A quarterly audit of a major energy company used to take 12 people three weeks to complete and they sifted thru over 2.5 million Google search results! Fast forward to the present – it now takes two people three days to do the same reporting with a much higher degree of accuracy. What is that worth to your bottom line?
Google is a search engine which is quite different than a social media monitoring tool. Realizing its limitations is important when you are expanding your efforts in monitoring social media. And if you’re waiting for them to provide a free social media monitoring service, you may be waiting a long time!
Good point Connie – and one that was raised emphatically at Monitoring Social Media 09 in Nov. by Giles Palmer of Brandwatch. Google are a long way off from the kind of data filtering and analysis that social media monitoring services offer, but many people expect them to release a ‘proper’ monitoring tool in Q1 2010. Any thoughts on that?
Hi Luke,
Yes, many people are ‘hoping’ but I don’t think that it will happen. Anyone that is aware of the amount of hardware and bandwidth that it takes to run services like Alterian SM2 and that of our competitors knows of the challenges.
From our perspective we expect a Google or Microsoft to enter the space and would welcome it. That would build credibility for the nascent industry and push it to mature. It would also start separating out the wheat from the chaff … there are over 150 various types of services which causes much confusion for brands & agencies.
Do you think Google will come thru?
Connie
If you’ve invested many hundreds of hours in understanding web analytics and all of the aspects of a relatively sophisticated tool such as Google Analytics then to be perfectly honest Connie having a sentiment monitoring layer in the Google tool would be preferable.
If you delve deeper into what GA already does you can see that there really isn’t that much of a step for them to add in the types of capability being offered from the likes of yourselves, Radian or Meltwater etc. Personally I would prefer not to have to learn the nuances of another new interface, particularly when I would feel the need to constantly cross reference the context of the main site analytics anyway.
Google will come thru. MS already launched an SMM tool, it’s called LookingGlass, and it’s still in beta.
Not from only the (“selfish”) standpoint of not having to learn another interface, having all your analytics in one tool allows for a much higher degree of insight. Convergence between all the different analytics tools is inevitable: there is much more value in having a 360 degree visibility of how your content/brand/product is being seen, spread and discussed from a single interface.
But even if that was already true today, these tools will eventually become a commodity. The real value is in extracting actionable information from the huge amount of data gathered, and we are a long ways from having computers that can do that.
Still, significant differentiation in the SMM tool space is possible: features that facilitate engagement in those tools are still primitive, and so is tracking of reach and magnitude of the reach of a single action. One thousand retweets by people with a couple dozen followers is worth less than a couple dozen retweets by a handful of major players.
Hi Eddie,
Yes Microsoft has Looking Glass and the videos on YouTube look impressive.
I agree that the human factor is important. That’s going to open up a whole new field for those that adept with analytics. And as you suggest interpretation and what’s done with the information is key.
Reach and influence are items that are challenging to define and yet we can see the results.
I don’t think the established vendors such as yourselves are under threat by Google, although I can see them, maybe, buying one of you in 2010! I agree that they are a way off providing the kind of context and drill down functionality that SM2 or Radian6 can provide and it will be interesting to see how they apply Analytics to the real time search results.
I think the best thing about Google/Bing showing real time results is that it highlights to any social media ‘wallflowers’ the importance of developing a strategy and presence ASAP or risk falling further off the consumers radar.
Ed
I think if an organisation has devolved analytics responsibilities to those on the frontline (say 25 people upwards), invested in training and brought diverse teams together to agree on, and monitor key metrics consistently, then a ’selfish’ standpoint on trying to keep things in one tool is a valid one. This type of activity can represent a significant cost to the organisation.
Also, collective, cumulative and shared knowledge is extremely important in these type of analytics initiatives to achieve actionable insight. If you’ve spent any time in a typical analytics tool, you’ll know the danger of taking information at face value therefore fragmenting monitoring tools unnecessarily can increase the danger of misinterpretation considerably.
I also believe Google will come through and hope that like they have done with their mobile phone it will be a big step above what the competition already offer.
This year will be a very interesting year for Social Media; we will see more companies like mine entering the arena to use it as a means of PR, Sales and Marketing and or as a means to simply engage with their customers.
We will see new monitoring tools arrive and we will begin to learn which companies are worth their salt.
Connie, you may recall I spoke to you in the later part of 2009 with regards to wage expectations for Online Management roles, again I thank you for your help and advice. I assume the reason for starting this article is to suggest that your company is ideally positioned to provide such monitoring tools? And if so why do you feel yours is better than others?