Brands are increasingly relying on social media listening tools for consumer insights, direct consumer responses and content publishing. These tools are becoming the primary interface between a typical brand and its social media constituency. This means that listening and response tools are also taking on an out-sized importance in the toolkit of marketers at major brands.
We recently undertook a rapid (and non-exhaustive) review of the social media listening and response tool landscape for a client. Like many of you, our eyes began to glaze over after we reviewed video demos and read marketing materials. It seemed like every tool was exactly the same. On the surface there was almost no differentiation among tools, but as we began our detailed briefings we learned that things were not quite what they seemed.
For the purposes of our search, we zeroed in on a sampling of six software-as-a-service (SAAS) tools that did (or claimed to do) three main things:
- Let us identify the online conversations in which brands should take part.
- Allow brands to route certain conversations across the organization to elicit the correct response.
- Respond to the conversation directly within the tool.
We learned many lessons and we’ve chosen to share a few below. However, the macro-lesson is simple: choose wisely. Every tool may sound the same, but when it comes to social media listening and response one missing detail can sink your whole strategy.
- You probably need more than one tool. Most systems are good at listening OR good at workflow OR good at content publishing. We didn’t see any that are a leader at all three. Whether it was inferior data or haphazard workflow or weak publishing capabilities, you can be pretty sure that any given tool performs great at one task, okay at another and terrible at the third.
- Don’t get cheap when it comes to good data. If you can’t find a social conversation then you can’t respond to it. When considering a listening and response tool, you should prioritize a vendor with high-quality social conversation data and complex query functionality. Otherwise you’ll just be sitting there waiting for someone to cruise by and mention your brand.
- Facebook data is available, but frequently not that useful. You can’t exclude statements when searching the Facebook API directly. Put more simply, you can’t use the word “NOT” in your search terms. So let’s say you want to find Facebook conversations about hot dogs (the food) and not warm pugs (the dogs). If the listening tool is doing a direct call on Facebook’s API, then you are stuck with every mention of Trixie the dog sweating in addition to every mention of Ballpark Franks. The only workaround is to index every mention of hot dogs in a database and then query against them using a proprietary search engine.
Hot Dog?
- Vendors get too cute with search functions. Boolean search terms (“AND”, “OR”, “NOT”) are a ubiquitous way to query a large database of text. Yet, if you think that you can get by with your knowledge of boolean operators when looking for social mentions then think again. For some strange reason every vendor has a different word to describe a search query and most have their own bizarre user interface for query construction. The industry needs to standardize on an open paragraph text box and boolean search terms as soon as possible.
- The tool is not that good for customer service. Trust us. Even though the majority of these tools claim to give brands an easy way to service customers in social media, the fact is that for the most part they can’t. In most tools creating and resolving a service case is just one big workaround. Meanwhile, the quality of customer service analytics is shameful. Time stamps are non-existent, service levels are hard to track and customer records are a joke. Almost without exception the customer service analytics for these vendors comes down to the same approach: export it to Excel and maybe you can build a macro.
All of these lessons will likely impact your tool selection process in some way, but the key to navigating a bake-off successfully is having a strong vision of what your needs really are. Every software selection process entails some compromises somewhere. If you know what your needs really then you can find a tool that is good enough for your purposes. Let us know if you need help.
Image credit: Petri Leinonen on Flickr
It’s true; all social listening tools are the same. Cool graphs, fancy charts, some mentions about your brand, and more importantly, no way to show how all of it impacts your business!
The problem with social monitoring is it only scratches the surface of what people actually need; actionable insights to correlate social data with key business performance indicators. That’s where social media business intelligence comes in.
With the combination of social data, listening, and business intelligence, companies can actually take the data they see and apply it to their every day business processes. With customized reports and armed with deep social analytics, C-suite execs can actually grasp on to something concrete with all that fluffy data; money!
Social monitoring is like standing in a goldmine with an HD camera; all you can do is take a picture! Social media business intelligence lets you dig in with a highly skilled team, top-notch equipment, and proper implementation strategy to turn that goldmine in to increased revenue for your business.
Thanks for the post!
- Sergei
Director of Marketing @EvoApp
@sdolukhanov (twitter)
Very good article. We are currently going through exactly the same process and in an enterprise it is even more difficult as the needs and priorities for what you want to do varies greatly, expecially with multiple customer facing brands.
Great article and couldn’t agree more. Tools have to be identified via business needs and then used as a first step in a larger framework of insight-driven reporting. The majority of work with SM analytics is culling through data and then telling a relevant, compelling story based on business-oriented hypotheses (unless it’s solely customer-service based).
Good article Brian. I’m currently developing course material for a local university on Measurement & Analytics of Social Media for businesses. I’ve been reading a lot of information about different applications, and experimenting with a number of tools that claim to help brands measure the ROI of their social media. I’d agree with you that most of these services seem to offer “all things to all people”, but in reality each business has individual goals and therefore unique needs to consider.
Interesting findings – thanks for sharing. I think the truth is that most ‘listening’ tools have been built with PR usecases in mind, not customer service; and in fact few companies are really ready to do ‘proactive’ customer service in this way. When we launched Conversocial, it was initially focused as a tool to easily manage your own Facebook page and Twitter account. We soon found that the retailers we were working with were getting huge value out of it by plugging in their customer service teams into their Facebook and Twitter accounts, where they were getting a large number of direct customer service queries. It was really important for them to answer these, and they liked our tool as it focused purely on these direct interactions (customers talking TO them), and not what people were saying ‘about’ them around the web. Over the last year our focus has changed to now be completely on social customer service delivered through Facebook and Twitter, and we believe this is much more business critical than using general listening tools, which will find it much harder to identify direct conversations.