Implementing a new system can be costly in subscription fees alone; some enterprise SMA solutions will set you back over $100,000 per month! I argue they’re vastly more damaging to the organization in an intangible way: it’s a huge blow to morale to adopt and abandon if the tool is simply not right for your needs.

We thought it worthwhile to amalgamate the collected wisdom from these critical minds that have tried more solutions collectively than any SMA supplier could ever possibly do on their own. I’ve got a few notes on things to look for and things to avoid:

1. Make sure what you’re getting from your solution is actionable. Infographics are trendy but it’s strategy you want. Charts are useless if they don’t give you a clue as to what to do next.
2. Make sure your solution captures networks of information and not just reporting on social-networks-as-silos. The real insights are in network effects and amplifications, not in short, non-linear relationships.
3. Do for data what hi-def did for TV. This means Natural Language Processing and sentiment analysis that are better than “positive, negative and neutral” and pull the qualitative gems from the quagmire. This goes for reporting on metadata that can tell you the who, what, where and when to give you a sense of the diffusion and discourse.
4. Filter spam. Don’t just say you do it; actually do it. Paying through the nose for a SMA with poor spam filtering is like going to Le Cirque and being expected to bus your own table.
5. Creating linkages between networks is what you pay the big bucks for and you want something that uses “sleuthy techniques”, algortihmic-ninja fancy footwork to open up that pandora’s box of the non-obvious.

Before going into any of the above however, I will recall two beautiful latin words “caveat emptor”, which means “don’t be a sucker” in plain english. Writing on Microsoft Word, WordPerfect 5.1 or on parchment has no real bearing on the quality of the prose. Ergo, an SMA tool will never define your problem for you. Dedicate some quality time to your business objectives, how social media impacts them and how you want to measure that.

Resources:

Nexalogy White Paper on Social Media Intelligence vs. Monitoring

I just spent the last two days at the MARCOM conference in Ottawa at the newly opened Ottawa Convention Centre. The conference was organized by CEPSM and we were happy to go live with a dynamic twitter graph of #marcomforum related tweets in real time.

I enjoyed learning about the differences between public sector marketing and private sector marketing and how social media can bridge the two. Jim Mintz‘ talk on Wednesday morning focused on public sector branding and emphasized that determining brand position and competitors is essential, especially given that branding takes place in social media whether public sector actors expect it or not. Jim made a good point that public sector branding doesn’t have to be expensive if you communicate to clients and stakeholders with a consistent effort over time. Josef Jurkovic discussed the special concerns of public sector actors but still held that it is “a horizontal world where partners and issues matter.” The presentation finished with an interesting discussion of which government departments have good branding: CMHC, SSHRC, Service Canada and Health Canada were pointed out, but in my opinion the social media receptiveness scale runs from Service Canada to Canada Science and Technology Museum to Canada Revenue Agency and Health Canada.

However, next to the keynote by Brian Solis, the presentation on crowdsourcing by Pierre Bisson and Jon Juane from Service Canada was my favourite presentation of the conference. The presentation explained the Service Canada Centres for Youth #sccy crowdsourced video contest and evaluated the key concerns and benefits of crowdsourcing for social marketing:

- Brand reputation

- Evaluation

- Crowd control

- Peaks & valleys

- Policies & guidelines

- Creating content

- Building the community

- Marketing and promotion

There was a lot of activity at our booth, which was next to Radian6‘s (Jon McGinley from Radian6 argued that social media represents revolutionary democratization), and the conference participants I spoke with were interested in the power of social media for gauging reactions, issues, actors and reputations related to public marketing campaigns a set of concerns related to social media that public sector actors will increasingly need to face and master.

Resources :

• Microsite for following the Marcom Forum
• Environics social media tool kit