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« Give? In this Economy? In Minnesota! Today! | Main | Tiger Woods' One-Percent Problem » In Social Media Monitoring, You Can't Always 'Trust Your Instruments'Posted by Jason Swartz on November 25, 2009 at November 25, 2009 1:55 PMWe do quite a bit of social media monitoring for clients here at Padilla, using some fancy and some not-so tools in the process. However, one thing I've learned is that you can't always trust your instruments. While monitoring tools like Radian6 and others are great for gaining insight into a particular topic, you can't rely solely on their results. In addition to these tools, you also need to do a bit of hands-on searching. This is where you manually research sites such as LinkedIn (which by the way prohibits access by monitoring tools) to get a deeper dive into the conversations going on. This is especially true for LinkedIn's Q&A section, which we've found to be an untapped well of new business opportunities for ourselves and our clients. Another instrument included with the major social media monitoring tools is an automated sentiment feature, which provides you with an idea for whether a conversation about you is positive, negative or neutral. However, automating this process is difficult. I sometimes find that a very positive mention is rated as negative - simply due to the fact that a word like "sucks" appears somewhere in the conversation, but not necessarily next to your brand name. The automation certainly helps get you part of the way there. But you need to verify. Finally, monitoring tools don't provide you with a list of next steps or strategic recommendations based on the data, which is why you're monitoring in the first place. It's great to know what's out there, but even better to know what to do with it. At the end of the day, these tools are an absolutely necessary component for gaining insight into the conversations about you, your company and/or your brand. However, it's equally important to look beyond these tools and do some investigating on your own. The extra time you'll spend will definitely be worth the effort.
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