The Myth of Social Media Monitoring

Everyone wants to define how to best measure Social Media these days.

Here's a video on how Digital Royalty says to measure Social Media. (h/t to Gavin)

I actually spewed coffee out of my nose when Spider Man lady got to "Return on Influence".

Here's how Sequentia Environics says to measure Social Media.

You can register for their white paper.  But they are wrong too.

Harsh?  Maybe.  What makes me so certain that they are wrong?

Because they are attempting to answer the wrong question.

I don't think we need to agree on how to measure social media yet.  First we need to understand how to find the "signal in the noise".  How do we filter out what is of value to an organization?  How does an organization engage with its audience and customers?  And can this be truly automated into a dashboard?

How does what we find help to transform the business to directly impact product development, revenues or achievement of their mission?

I have a theory, but first I want to pass the microphone to some folks doing some great thinking in this space, the Dachis group.

"Technology can help us listen to everything that's ever been said about ourselves our company, brand  etc.—but finding that one key, game changing insight in a sea of infinite chatter and then actually doing something about it is another story."
David Armano

What is worth finding?  What are we looking for?

Jevon references a model that defines how the Dachis Group is approaching the problem of social business design.

I really, really like this model.  I can see how the four archetypes around the outside are driving their thinking around organizational change in three areas: workforce collaboration, customer participation and partner optimization.

The Role of Immersion

We are working with a number of our clients on monthly monitoring of social media to identify emergent trends, the results of our activities across channels and more.  But all of this amounts to no more than another report on the shelf unless we can tie it to real insights that are impacting key individuals within our clients' organizations.

The real power of social media monitoring is not in fancy reports brought down to a series of baseline measures.

Rather, the potential lies in a group of employees connecting into the digital landscape, empowered with a variety of real-time and (amazingly) free tools to monitor and manage conversations.  From these individuals comes the real value of social media. 

"A large consumer product company found out about a group of people who were brainstorming a way to solve a problem which was related to this company. Because this consumer product company has people working for it who actively participate in networks, and monitor the space, they found out about it. Someone identified this idea as a signal in a sea of noise—there are a lot of people who talk about this company daily, but this was different. The people who independently brainstormed this idea outside of the company's ecosystem are now talking to the people who work for the company about making the idea into a reality. "
David Armano

Enterprises Need to Change not Measure More

Is there some validity to having a system for measuring social media?  Yes.  The fact that so many research firms are suggesting you can outsource this measurement activity points to the crux of my argument, though.

I have a theory that there is significant overlap between Enterprise 2.0 and Social Media.  I don't think this is a big insight and I'm certainly not alone nor the first in this thinking.  But to work with this theory, we need to slowly expand our efforts in both spaces to create fundamental change in how a business operates, invents, creates value, services customers, etc.

Today we find firms actively assisting companies with what is just the tip of the iceberg in both the enterprise 2.0 and social media spaces.  What is so fascinating is that many folks are seeing these as two unique and disconnected activities.

[Image corrected]

Beneath the waters of our increasingly digital world, a future awaits where enterprise 2.0 and Social Media efforts meet and form the backbone for real innovation, future profits and deeper relationships with customers.