CopyDiva

Here’s a data point. I was at a Business Marketing Association meeting last week, talking to an agency principal who’s recently started using a social media monitoring service — the name of which I frankly can’t remember (I hadn’t heard of them before anyway). He had also demo’ed one of the bigger players in the space as well, but chose this new vendor because he liked the user interface better. In his mind, the actual data collection were comparable amongst all the vendors he looked at.

His need was not focused on real-time data — he needed brand-related data, which any of the vendors have, some of it real time, some not, some more robust and complete, some with more sources available.
What I wonder, from this very unscientific singular data point: Are measurement and social media monitoring services losing differentiation? Are they all delivering the same promise, or is it time for these folks to really work on that differentiation among the brands?

Certainly, there are differences — in everything from data quality to the analytics. But, are the vendors in this space doing a good job of letting the market know their differences? Do they need to at this point, or is the market big enough for continuing generic explanations of what social media monitoring or listening services offer?

Here’s my every now-and-again list of posts that’s I’ve liked and followed recently:

• I have heard many people talk about how every company should have a blog, which I really disagree with. Seems BL Ochman and I follow the same line of thinking.
• Discussions of measurement and ROI abound, both in the context of scalability (and here) and justification of paying for social media engagement.
• And yet others on measuring Word-of-Mouth and standardizing metrics there as well.
• Ways to bucket social media technologies.
• Should corporate communications people show their true colors when engaged online, or does that deflect from “the brand?”

Pat LaPointe takes some folks to task about the nebulous metrics of social media measurement tools. Now, I don’t necessarily agree with the ultimate premise — that social media measurement shouldn’t get money because ROI is fuzzy. However, it does bring up the issue for me that measurement of social media ought to have specific goals, such as:

• Baseline understanding: what’s our competitive position or share-of-voice?
• Location: where are the conversations happening that are important to the company, brand, industry, etc?
• Sentiment: are there glaring issues with perception of us?
• Trends: what’s the general context of the conversations? Do participants talk about us the way we expect?

Based on initial baselines, you’ve got somewhere to go — somewhere to move the needle. Can you make a difference through some kind of tangible engagement? What will have the greatest impact? If we change the way we talk about us to be more like what people say about us in social media, will it have a positive result on some other metric?