Jason Falls wrote an important blog post the other day, Where Social Media Monitoring Services Fail. The one quibble I have with his post – and it’s big enough to deserve its own post here – is that he assumes that the “intelligence” part is something the client has to do themselves. He writes, “…they [monitoring companies] probably won’t ever be good at doing all of the job because you have to do it.” This is difficult, to say the least, because to do it correctly requires skills that most companies don’t have on hand.
There are three particular skills that are required to do social media intelligence well:
- The ability to build a comprehensive dataset to analyze. This is more complicated than it sounds, and there are many pitfalls to avoid in trying. To gain any real insight from social media sources requires going as far down the long tail as possible when building a dataset. In our experience, this means relying on a much larger universe of social media sources than most monitoring companies can access.
- An established methodology to use to analyze the contents of the dataset (once it has been properly constructed). In other words, once you have 4000 (or 40,000) blog posts or tweets on a subject, how do you read that material and make sense of it? Doing this right is not as simple as starting at the top and going through all of the material – and anyhow, given a large dataset it would be impossible to do it that way. We use software that we have built that implements approaches based on decades of academic experience to do this. Most companies don’t have the skills in-house to do this correctly.
- The background to take rigorously analyzed data and apply it to help to solve particular strategic challenges. Companies vary widely in this respect. Some companies use a great deal of data to make decisions, but some run more on instinct than anything else. To do social media analysis correctly, the company providing the service has to offer a sliding scale of post-analysis services, from simple coaching on how to use the intelligence produced all the way to the development of complete strategic plans and even management of the execution of such plans.
As a social media intelligence company, Nexalogy Environics appreciates the quality of the work our cousins in the social media monitoring segment are doing. However, as we’re seeing more and more every day, social media presents greater challenges to companies than monitoring can fully address. As Jason Falls suggests, there’s a clear case for a more robust approach to intelligence – but it’s not at all obvious that it’s the client companies themselves who can or should be doing that intelligence work. Our clients get much better results at a more cost-effective rate than anything they could do themselves.
