Social Media Monitoring or Social Media Research?

It’s a question that comes up a lot with new or prospective clients – what is the difference and value of social media research in regards to social media monitoring. It’s a good question. The answer is “both” are critical. Here’s our take on why and the difference.

If you’re looking to develop a social media strategy, then you need to “listen” before you develop a strategy and listen before you actually engage. This is where the “social media research” aspect comes into play. By conducting the research into social media first, you’ll understand a) if there is any conversation about you taking place, b) what is being said, c) where it is taking place and c) who is talking about your company or organization. This initial research provides the key insights you’ll need to make effective business decisions.

In developing a social media strategy, the questions you need answered are those in the above paragraph. Once those questions are answered, you can then determine a) should I be engaged in social media and if so, to what degree? b) Which channels should I be focusing my resources on, c) what kind of resources do I need and what are the associated costs, d) what kind of content will my audience respond to (e.g. video, text, audio, images) and e) what do I then need to monitor, how often and what tools are best?

At MediaBadger, we come in at the first part- the social media research. From the results of our research, we can recommend the best tools to use for social media monitoring, how often and where to monitor in line with your budget and available resources. Hiring a social media research firm is a critical part to your overall online marketing strategy. Such research can identify keywords for search engine optimization, social media optimization, Web design issues (i.e. User Interface Design), nature and form of content and what business units may be most impacted by social media.

I’ll note that one constant complaint amongst our clients is that they hire a 20-something MBA or grad student to do the initial “listening” but the results are tepid at best. That’s because they are missing the point and the target audience. If you still think social media is not for kids, you’re completely missing your target audience – to the detriment of your bottom line. While MBA’s and PR degrees or diplomas are incredibly valuable, they do not make up for real-world or industry business experience. Such experience is critical to being able to understand the “data” to turn it into useful information that can be acted on to make a positive impact to a business overall or a business unit.

Monitoring comes afterward and is equally important and is often called online reputation management or ORM. We generally do not provide monitoring services. There are a number of tools and services that do that; at the top end is radian6 and the bottom end is WhosTalkin, a free service that offers links but no metrics or sexy graphs. In fact there are over 40 services. Keep in mind though that almost all of them only use a connection to Google, which means serious limitations on what might be found…all miss key hyper-localization services such as Yelp or FourSquare – that’s important if your a very local business. We often help clients find the best monitoring solution for their business, industry and budget. Conversely we offer monthly and quarterly updates – which may be preferred if your engagement level is low and audience participation not on the level of the likes of say Apple, Nike, Adidas or Sony.

So to sum it all up; the research part provides you with the road map of where to go and what to say while the monitoring makes sure your good with your audience for the online reputation management component. Here’s a blog post on SocialMedia Today talking about where monitoring tools fail as well. And here is a good list of monitoring services.

Some Don’t Want Your Opinion

Social Media consultants and public relations professionals will all tell you one key thing of being involved in social media; be sure to engage if you’re blogging as a company. Allow comments, yes, moderate, but engage. But some don’t or wont. We took a look at who’s blogging but doesn’t really want to allow comments.

We were rather intrigued by the results. We examined 500 corporate blogs and found that 94% of them allow comments and of that 94%, 90% moderated the comments. We then looked to provincial and state governments and found 87% out of 105 blogs allowed comments and 95% of those moderated the comments.

We then looked at the non-profit sector and stumbled across the online sector of Cyburbia least likely to allow comments, even moderated ones…our research lead us to religious groups. Those who could be defined as more “extreme” in either the Christian, Islamic or other religions 98.5% of the time did not allow commenting at all – 600 blogs were analyzed. As religious groups moved more to the centre, we found 73% allowed moderated comments and 6% allowed comments without moderation. We’ll let you put your own interpretation to that.

But in summary we can conclude that businesses generally are looking to engage their audience and are more open. Religious groups that are more moderate will be more open to discussion and contrary opinions but those that are more conservative are more interested in pushing a message and less likely to want to hear contrary opinions. NGO’s and NPO’s also will engage with their audiences.

(Author: G. Crouch)

Civilizations and Social Technologies

If you’re still in the mindset that it’s just kids using social media, then you’ll more than likely entirely miss the point of the rest of this blog entry. And if you think social media is just about marketing and silly videos, images and text, you’ll completely miss it. If you also don’t think a tweet in China makes a difference in the world, it’s time to buy a cabin in the woods. Way far away.

Last Saturday, Saudi Arabia unlocked Facebook after reviewing what it called “moral concerns” with content. Pakistan and Bangladesh have done the same. The government of Belarus shut down the mobile network during elections. A young mayoral candidate in Calgary won recently by leveraging social media tools, Obama use social media tools to raise vast campaign funds.

In our ongoing research across many geopolitical sectors, we are increasingly finding a growing influence by both secular and religious groups looking to influence political affairs. Nothing new. But what is interesting is how various groups are beginning to harness the power inherent in these tools. And how they can expand their influence both online and into the real world. For those that might dismiss many of these displays of activism as mouse-click protests only, that too is changing.

Such groups all start with ideas and concepts that are refined into dogma and positions. With social technologies they can be better defined and shaped through collaboration or seeming collaboration. From there they seep into the real world through petitions, organized street protests and lobbying of governments.

Today we’re in the opening acts of how these technologies might be used. Countries like the Ukraine, Belarus, Iran and others are figuring things out quickly, yet still nascent in their application. Yet they have impacted foreign policy decisions by governments – such as the US State Department requesting Facebook delay its server maintenance during the Iranian elections.

Social technologies are about society, not just organizing parties and sharing silly photo’s and videos. The questions then become – when and how will things change?

The Most Negative Channel

Simply put, we love to gripe. It’s just part of our human condition it would seem. Complaining, venting, whinging, whining…whatever you want to call it. When it comes to social media channels, well, in our research, we see a lot of this negative content. But where do we gripe the most? Online newspaper sites.

Last year we did some research into comments left on newspaper sites. We had delved into over 150,000 comments across 38,000 or so articles. So recently, we decided to look into finding out the most “negative” of social media channels. We took our comment research then looked at 2,500 Facebook fan pages, 1,500 Twitter hashtag topics (ranging from products to services) and the same in Identi.ca and then 1,800 newsgroups and forums.

While plenty of griping can take place in any channel, online newspapers showed 87% overall to have the most negative comments on issues and stories. Channels like microblogs don’t allow for much “discussion” with 140 characters, but often reference articles with extensive commentary.

Why newspapers as “Gripe Central” then? Perhaps because you can say more, perhaps it is more topically focused. In blog posts and newsgroups we noted in prior research that people tend to go “off topic” fairly quickly (less so with blogs where 92.4% of the time they stay focused, but newsgroups digress faster) but comments on newspaper articles stay more topically focused (98.5% of the time). What do you think?

Reading comments on newspaper articles can help “frame” value sets and citizen perceptions (once one excludes those just ranting without adding value or propagating a position or astroturfing) and get a sense of the broader issues. But sadly, it would seem we prefer to gripe. This research reflects US, Canadian and British citizens.

(Author: G. Crouch)

Is It Getting Harder to Be Found?

The market for search engine optimization is huge. It’s also confusing and a constant battle for those consultants who do it to stay on top of it. Then there’s the black hat SEO types muddying the waters; link spammers, baiters and more. Then enter Facebook and it’s growing power of search. Let’s toss into that mix the Microblogs like Twitter or Plurk and the 40+ smaller ones. Next to toss in is social bookmarking like Dleicious. Then news aggregators like AllTop, Mixx or Digg. Don’t forget other social networks like Russia’s Vkontakte or Badoo in India. Spice it up with video channels like Vimeo and YouTube (over 40 of them in there) and then photo sharing like Flickr and Picasa. Getting to be a lot isn’t it?

These are just the channels. Let’s add some more ingredients to the mixture – how people are searching and how content is being identified. We have tags, slashtags (from Blekko), hashtags in Twitter and good old SEO tactics like meta tags and word weighting. Let’s not forget the growing element of content seeding in social media channels.

The recipe is getting rather complex; more terms and ingredients than in a Twinkie but with a shelf life less than a ripe banana sitting in the sun. All of this driven by a multitude of chefs screaming their recipe is the best. Is there a Gordon Ramsay to step in and give a liberal dose of the “F word” to straighten it all out? Not yet. A Jamie Oliver to gracefully put it all into an easy to digest, healthy, tasty full course meal? Not yet.

With all the research and consulting we do, it seems increasingly harder for companies to get found out there. So many channels, so many services and so many approaches. Add in the fact you can spend a whole session online without even using a Web browser or traditional consumer search engine.

I have no answers. We’re just one of many chefs stumbling about the kitchen…what do you think?