How to Manage this Emerging Set of Activities
As I mentioned in my last post, it’s really early days for social media analytics. But that doesn’t mean that organizations shouldn’t get started in this domain. Herewith, a few suggestions for how to manage this emerging set of activities:
• Companies think social media are free, but they’re not. To use these tools effectively, you need to spend some money on people and tools to manage and monitor your social media presence. If you spend nothing, you’ll get no value.
• Don’t think you’re going to save money on traditional marketing either. Some executives seem to feel that they can use social media instead of traditional marketing channels, and the analytics can help to document the savings potential. Don’t count on it, at least for now. You can’t slack off on other advertising approaches yet, because social media marketing still appeals to only a segment of the population, and every channel contributes to the overall impression of your brand.
• If you can’t justify a separate group for social media analytics, think about combining that focus with other capabilities for mining text and unstructured data. The same text classification approaches that work for social media will also help in addressing customer emails, warranty reports, etc. This type of data is hardly going away, and you need to build a capability to deal with it.
• As with almost all other analytics, you need to have a hypothesis if you’re going to really find out anything useful. Fishing expeditions with analytics traditionally don’t yield a lot of fish. Think about the particular questions you have before you delve into the data: is there a particular brand-related idea or concept that you want to see if people are talking about online? Are people more buzzed about this product, or that one?
• All social media voices are not equal; some are much more influential than others. Begin to weigh your analyses by the influence of the voice. A tweet, for example, from someone with thousands of followers is much more important than one with a small audience.
• There are some broad concepts that should influence your analyses. You should be thinking about issues like “advocacy” for and “engagement” with your brand. Ideally, social media will simply be one channel that contributes to these larger objectives. These big-picture issues will help to keep you and your company from drowning in the minutiae of social media.
There is a lot of excitement about social media. Unfortunately, the enthusiasm for measuring and monitoring it is at a lower level. If you want to really make an impact with your social media activities, invest in your analytical capabilities from the beginning.
