With the amount of hype and plethora of information on social media monitoring, the selection of a social media monitoring tool can seem like a daunting task. It doesn’t have to be, as long as it’s understood that there is absolutely no silver bullet here and the tool is only a part of your social media strategy.

Having been through this selection process in a number of client projects, here are few steps to (hopefully) make it a bit easier to follow:

1. Research. Arguably, each tool tends to focus on different ends of the market (e.g. small to medium ventures vs. large enterprises vs. agencies monitoring multiple brands) and may follow different approaches (e.g. monitor everything social media vs. focus on specific groups of influencers), therefore it’d be good to do some upfront research (that includes price points as well because there is variance there too). Don’t be afraid to talk to vendors about what you are trying to do; they are usually very helpful, but remember it’s a new paradigm, so no one can have all the answers on a plate.

2. Plan. Before trying the tools, set a clear plan on what you want to achieve. Define this plan around a real-world situation for your organization, not around some hypothetical case (actually most vendors’ case studies are based on very high profile searches that generate tons of social media activity, this might not be realistic for your organization’s scope). It’s easy to get lost in the vast amount of social media data that’s out there, so having a well-defined goal with measurable objectives and pragmatic tactics to achieve them is what you should always start out with.

3. Evaluate. Although not much comparative information is available to size up one tool next to another, almost all vendors offer some type of free sandbox account or trial version or live product demo, so this is something to definitely benefit from before making a decision on what tool to pick. Set up multiple trials in parallel for the same plan to be able to evaluate the capabilities of each tool side by side but always keeping your plan and goal from #2 in mind.

4. Adapt. When evaluating the tools, spend some time initially and keep revising regularly to fine tune the configuration of your search profiles (in terms of keywords to include/exclude as well as sources to filter in/out). It is clear that these tools require some adapting to effectively monitor a specific industry by making sure they get to know the most influential social media outlets. This makes a great difference in the amount and relevancy of the results you will be getting back from the tools (and from any search tool for that matter).

5. Oversee. Don’t forget that the data and reports coming out of the tools do require human processing and oversight to become truly useful and actionable when trying to meet real business needs (in this case, your plan and goal from #2). Actually, there is a great post by Matt Dickman on how to execute a listening plan that builds this point to full extend. This is becoming a more and more important factor in the sense that now that you start having social media monitoring data, what do you do with it? Depending on your objectives, the types of engagement will differ, but ultimately, certain processes are common for whatever you are trying achieve, for example you will always need to:

• Identify internal or external resources that can engage on social media.
• Set up a workflow to communicate opportunities and engage properly and timely.
• Plan and execute engagement actions and track follow-ups.
• Etc.

6. Measure & report. Regarding comparative monitoring performance among the tools, there may be certain case studies (see Ken Burbary’s post and an older post of mine), but there is no conclusive evidence that one tool does better than another for certain media types. In any case, you should track measurements and generate reports for each tool to be able to make your final decision. Your metrics should refer to your plan and goal from #2, but may extend to cover potentially new areas that you have uncovered while using the tools and can be valuable to your organization.

7. Diversify. Lastly, I would recommend using at least a couple of tools to make sure you get different angles in your monitoring efforts. Maybe a mix of paid and unpaid tools like, for example, Radian6 or SM2 coupled with Google Alerts, Social Mention, and/or Twitter Search.

Lastly, one final note: The social media monitoring space is already getting crowded with existing players and new entrants and more are coming, so it might seem overwhelming at first to try to try to pick a product or service to use – btw, you may get an almost full list of all the tools at Ken Burbary’s wiki. That won’t change any time soon. Expect new vendors to try to find their niche by specializing on certain types of uses and integrating with other analytics technologies for more sophisticated functionality. Also, expect more M&As and consolidations before few sizable players settle down (think Microsoft and Google among others). So, you may want to take that into account if you are getting ready to commit to a tool.

This year Covisio had the opportunity to run a number of social media listening campaigns for our clients worldwide (please note that our clients are primarily in the high technology sector). As we are rapidly approaching the end of the year, I wanted to share a few real-world cases that we came across and I think are quite useful to show what can happen (or not happen) in social media monitoring programs.

So here are our most telling stories:

Disgruntled user group on Facebook. One of our clients was operating under the not-so-uncommon assumption that: “Our firm is not yet doing anything on social media, so there shouldn’t be anything on us out there, right?” Unfortunately, wrong! For this particular client, there were a number of LinkedIn groups of current and ex- employees, a few product and promotional videos (that our client did not know they even existed) on YouTube, and at least two groups (with memberships at the thousands) dedicated to complaints about the client’s product on Facebook. A very basic listening campaign picked all that up and helped direct and prioritize our client’s social media efforts to remedy the developing bad reputation.

PR agency miss. One of our clients was very proud of one particular feature of their product that differentiated themselves from their competitors in the marketplace. A leading US newspaper published an article on the impact this particular feature had on the market and invited our client’s top competitor to comment on it (without even mentioning our client in the article). Our client’s PR agency completely missed this opportunity both before and after it was published. Now, the newspaper also published a post on their technology blog about their article, which our listening campaign picked up. Based on this information, our client had to revisit their relationship with their PR agency, but, more importantly, they were able to post a comment on the newspaper’s blog with their own view on the particular feature, which it turn generated some excellent traffic on their own blog where they discuss in detail their differentiating functionality.

New sales opportunity. Our listening campaign picked up a blog post of a CxO that was explaining in detail their immediate need for a specific product that one of our clients provides. The blog post included a thorough analysis of requirements and a good qualification of the opportunity in terms of influencers, competitors, and timeframes. Our client was able to jump in the opportunity and they are now in the final shortlist.

Sensitive material on YouTube. Actually, something that’s very common. Our listening campaign revealed a couple of product demo videos on YouTube with sensitive information about the technology of one of our clients. The videos were posted by an implementation consultant with the best of intentions, but our client was uncomfortable with the information disclosed, so the videos were quickly taken down in agreement with the consultant.

Competitive intelligence. A wealth of information here:

• Figuring out what blogs from our client’s competitors are working and what not. Examples: We came across a competitor blog with tremendous engagement level and we learned a lot from it. But we also came across a competitor blog that does not allow commenting (which, in general, is against what we consider best practices) and we learned a few things from it as well.
• Uncovering “black-hat” SEO techniques our client’s competitors were using by publishing duplicate content in multiple social media outlets just to build links to their site.
• Discovering aggressive and unsolicited tweets from our client’s competitors to infiltrate conversations on Twitter and blatantly promote their product.
• Identifying new competitors in our client’s field based on their activity on social media.

PR pickup on Twitter. How many followers did our client’s press release reach via tweets and re-tweets? Hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands? A useful number we have been able to benchmark against on behalf of our clients.

SEO hints. One of our clients is providing a technology solution in an emerging market. Despite a well-coordinated SEO effort, our listening campaign found out that some of their keywords were not used in the context that was initially assumed, so they had to be reevaluated.

Positive mentions. This is an important one. Our listening campaign for a specific marketing program of one of our clients found out a number of ongoing positive mentions on blogs, Twitter accounts, forums, wikis, social networks. It made a huge difference for our client to be able to identify these mentions and thank people for their feedback.

Conversations spanning multiple media. A very influential blog post generated a tremendous amount of discussion in the form of comments, additional posts on other blogs, new topics in forums, and opinionated conversations on social networks. The ability to consolidate all this information and get a global understanding of the issue at hand and all the different stakeholders involved was very valuable for our client to decide on how and when to engage in the conversation.

Inside information on industry events. Before, during, and after major industry events there is a lot of activity on blogs, social networks, and Twitter. Although part of this activity is mainly for event attendees to connect to each other and socialize at the event, we have found some great insights about the topics covered in the event for one of our clients that was not able to attend.

These are actually true cases we came along throughout year and not theoretical scenarios. Feel free to share your own social media monitoring stories from 2009.

Not too long ago I followed a nice discussion on Ken Burbary’s blog about social media monitoring tools. Ken had come along some noticeable inconsistencies in the results reported by two leading social media platforms, namely Radian6 and Alterian/Techrigy SM2. Since we have been working here at Covisio with both of these tools for a while now, I agreed to post a few numbers based on our own experience from a real-world listening campaign that we are currently running for one of our clients in the enterprise software space.

Before moving on, a couple of disclaimers:

• My purpose is not to rate one tool vis-a-vis the other. As a matter of fact we have used both tools successfully to help clients with their marketing plans and that’s what really matters at the end. For this analysis here, we used the standard Radian6 version with one (paid) user account login to have access to the system (but no paid topic profile) and the Freemium version of SM2 – a setup similar to what a user evaluating both platforms might come up with (though both Radian6 and SM2 do offer 7-day trial versions of their full products).
• The results are from just a single project; they by no means constitute an all-inclusive comparative analysis of the two platforms. By the way, here’s a pretty detailed post by Jason Falls actually comparing the use of Radian6 to ScoutLabs, another social media monitoring tool.
• I understand there are differences between the two technologies in terms of what sources they use to pull data from and what internal technologies they use to classify the data and produce their reports. So I am aware that some variation in the reported results is to be expected. But how much is too much?

Now, we monitored data from 4 searches across all media types and for a period of 30 days:

• Search #1: company name.
• Search #2: industry term.
• Search #3: industry term.
• Search #4: product acronym (with a set of keywords to exclude as well as a set of source urls to filter out).

So, let’s look at what the tools came back with.

The first overview graph shows significant variations in the number of results returned from each tool with Radian6 consistently returning more items than SM2 (from 50% more to 450% more). The overlap (defined as per search, the # of same results divided by the # of total results from the tool that produced the lesser # of results) in the results of the two tools ranges anywhere between 30% (for a product acronym search with lots of noise) to 100% (for a straightforward company name search).

The second and third drill-down graphs show serious inconsistencies as well. Radian6 indicates that the predominant media type is blogs, while SM2 indicates that the predominant media types are either Twitter or “other”.

The bottom-line is that there are both quantitative and qualitative variations in the results reported by Radian6 and Alterian/Techrigy SM2 for the same search profiles. And there is limited overlap in the reported results, which seems to indicate that the search spaces covered by the two tools are very dissimilar. This to me is understandable, but I would expect to be able to adapt the tools (one way being by configuring their url filters, i.e. what urls to include and what to exclude) so that they start converging at least to identifying and tracking the most relevant conversations within an industry. At the end, although it is clear that social media technologies are still evolving, it is also clear that social media monitoring tools can be made extremely useful to (marketing, branding, customer service, R&D, legal, etc.) organizations, but not without a well-thought-of human investment to understand the results, interpret the findings, and take proper actions.

P.S. I am planning a follow-up post to discuss some of the things we learned when evaluating these social media monitoring tools and planning social media listening campaigns.

UPDATED (9/22/09): For a more complete analysis on the above social media monitoring results from Radian6 and Alterian / Techrigy SM2 towards the quality vs. the quantity of the results, here’s another graph on the relevancy of the results reported from each tool.

The graph shows that both tools deliver over 85% of relevant results for normal searches, but noise margins rise significantly for more involved searches (for example in search #4 the main keyword is a software product acronym that is our interest, but the keyword also matches names of religious groups, scientific techniques, and schools; despite the fact that the search has been configured in both tools to exclude results that contain certain keywords or are sourced from certain urls, the noise margin is still very high). More involved searches obviously require better optimized and more regularly updated search configurations to filter out irrelevant items based on context and source in order to maintain acceptable relevancy in the tools’ reported results.