Social Media Analytics Pt. 1: It’s Really Early Days

Companies Not Devoting Resources to Social Media Metrics

I’ve been doing some interviews with companies that are toying with social media analytics. The idea, of course, is to measure aspects of social media—blogs, tweets, Facebook wall-writings, and so forth—to determine what consumers think about a company or brand. There are a few available tools and services from established analytics companies like SAS, and new vendors like Radian6. I’ve made a few initial observations:

1. It’s really early days. Most companies are just getting started and are only toying with the technology and the approach.

2. It’s hard to determine what consumers are really saying. To correctly classify online text requires serious textual analysis, and it’s not for the fainthearted. SAS bought a company, Teragram, to help it do this sort of thing, and it still believes that some human oversight of the classification is useful.

3. There is real potential here. One large company I talked with, for example, examined the frequency and direction (positive or negative) of comments about two different advertisements, and found the reaction to one was fifty times more than another. In other words, you can use this for relatively cheap and quick market research on your marketing.

4. Most executives still don’t get social media or analytics of same. The company I described above still went with the much less popular ad for a big TV event. Enough said.

5. There aren’t enough people to do this work. Some very large companies have only a fraction of a person devoted to social media. This is not terribly surprising; it echoes Eric Peterson’s research (http://www.webanalyticsdemystified.com/) showing that most organizations have only a partial FTE devoted to web analytics, which is more established than social media analytics.

6. Call it analytics if you want, but it’s really measuring and reporting. Just as “web analytics” activity primarily consists of report generation, social media analytics is mostly reports about social media.

OK, this post may be a useful primer on social media analytics, but it doesn’t tell you a lot about how to go about managing them. In my next post I’ll give a few more constructive observations.