Figure from Social Times (originally by Converseon)
As the year 2010 is nearing its end, this is a good time to pause and think what the past 300 odd days have brought along from the viewpoint of Social Media, and the varied approaches to it. A few of the emerged trends during the year have been, for example:
- The amount of the term PR being used along Social Media almost inseparably
- How social networks such as Twitter and Facebook are being handled by search engines
- Where is Twitter going to make its revenue from?
- Finally, different ways of talking about engagement, listening, ‘doing social media’ and other synonyms in the form of countless How To’s and How Not To’s
Back in 2009, this year was expected to be ‘The Year of Social Media’, and by the looks of things, both in terms of online ad revenue and the growth of the most popular social media networks and other social media outlets, this year was the busiest any of us have seen to date – even though it still feels as if there could be more done so that social media business could keep up with the hype.
However, quite a big part of the discussion regarding 0social media and all of its related features was set either in the past or present in terms of ‘what has happened?’ or ‘how to do something now?’ – what we are looking forward to, is the future of social media, and where all of this today-oriented discussion is actually taking us. What to look forward to in 2011?
One of the most important things to look forward to, especially from the Social Media Monitoring and Analysis point of view is less emphasis on monitoring, and more profound need for analysing what is being said in online discussions. What needs to happen first, is that brands start to organize themselves internally, so that they have ample resources to tackle social media issues, and the ability to create a working process for using social media tools in a more full-blown manner. That seems to be missing at the moment, but then again, web-analytics was facing the exact same problem just about five years ago.
In essence, brands should make a move from monitoring (i.e. hearing) to actually listening to their customers. What listening calls for, is a set of data, both quantitative and qualitative, that can help to answer more questions than one. For example, knowing why a thousand people got to your website can be answered quite easily with one tool, but it takes another to answer the question ‘why did these 1,000 people come to my website in the first place?’ – and this just one of the questions social media analysis can help you solve.
We came across a very insightful post on Social Times titled ‘10 Rules for Successful Social Media Monitoring & What They Mean to You’. While the social media discussion across industry blogs is riddled with eye-catching headlines promising ‘10 tips for doing this’ and the ‘5 dont’s of doing that’, what really makes this post on Social Times stand out was the ‘What They Mean to You’-part. This post is based on the Listening 2.0 whitepaper done by the American social media consultancy company Converseon. What the post really answers to is not just how social media monitoring works, why it is done or how, but instead the post points to the next step of what brands should expect for when comparing social media analysis vendors.
There is a big difference in being able to offer tools for just social monitoring (i.e. raw data from social media sources) and being able to lead brands into customer intelligence (i.e. giving results on tone of discussion – or sentiment, marking search topic reach, finding relevant keywords around a theme, showing site or user influence in terms of discussion topic, etc.).
What we at Whitevector are expecting, for 2011, is to find more of these brands who understand the need to find actual customer intelligence through social media, since this is exactly what our service aims to produce continuously.
