How to Select a Social Media Monitoring Vendor Partner

Learn more about Alterian SM2 Social Media Monitoring at www.alterian.com/sm2

Introduction

Social Media Monitoring (SMM) is a confusing space with many new vendors popping up every day. 7-8 months ago there were a handful, today there are 100’s. SMM is actually a very complex technology challenge and to do it well requires some serious know how, experience and resource investment from a vendor. We’ll attempt to provide a few key things to think about, a few questions to ask yourself and a few more to ask the SMM vendors in order to help you make the best most appropriate choice for your needs.

Overall

• Do you desire to be self service or do you prefer to outsource the job?Your budget or time priorities may dictate this decision.

• What are your goals? What action will you take based on your findings?

Key Things to Remember

• Social media is conversational chatter in blogs, micro blogs, forums and the like. It is unstructured data!!

• Spend some time up front fine tuning your search and designing your vision for the analysis, it will pay off in rich relevant content and easier analysis on the back end.

Regarding Vendor Selection

First of all you need to think about SMM in terms three distinct pieces of technology:

1.Collection - crawling Web 2.0 and collecting the content

2.Storage - for historical trending and easy reliable access

3.Understanding - ways in which the content is delivered to you, via user interface or other.

Collection

You want broad collection across all sources, you don’t want to miss any gems! This may be the trickiest of the three technology challenges since the social media landscape is still rapidly evolving. New sites are popping up all the time and existing sites are constantly changing their lay out and content templates behind the scenes. And there are different methodologies depending on the site, so you can’t take a cookie cutter approach.

So at the end of the day there has to be a considerable commitment by the vendor to spending time and resources to make sure they are staying on top of the dynamic content collection space.

Collection

Key Questions to Ask Vendors:

•What are the methods used to collect SM content? (If they say RSS feeds and other free tools run away)

•Is it Global? How do you know which content sites are important to cover in, say, Eastern Europe?

•What are the different kinds of SM content you collect? (blogs, video/photo share sites, message board, forums, wiki’s, microblogs)

•When is the content collected? Daily?

•Is it possible to add other data streams, content sites via url address or RSS feed or other method?

Storage

You want access to historical results. This part of SMM requires hard core database building expertise and needs to be designed and architected for this type of application. For example, you don’t want to end up searching the whole database every time you drill into your results and you want the ability to look back at full historical content with ease.

Storage

Key Questions to Ask Vendors:

•What capabilities for accessing historical content do you have?

•Where and how is the content stored?

•Can I drill down into results? When I see a spike in conversations what options do you provide for me to drill down?

•When grabbing results for my search do I have quick access to further analysis?

•Are there any fields of meta-data attached to each content result?

•What kind of backup, security and controls do you have in place?

Understanding (Analysis and Reporting)

The first step is getting to the right content. So it’s critical to understand how to set up your search criteria. Remember you are trying to grab relevant results for your specific project from billions of conversations from around the World. So it’s important to balance the need for quantity and quality. You need a variety of ways to filter, exclude, white list and black list sources in order to get good rich content.

Understanding (Analysis and Reporting)

It’s best to have direct access and control over the content as opposed to getting a regular report. You want to be able to “roll around” in the data yourself. We feel that there is a certain level of familiarity and context you want when you’re working with critical data sets, you want to know the caveats, variables and strengths and weaknesses so when you’re looking atsummary data you can be a better judge of validity and therefore what conclusions to draw.

Conclusion

At the end of the day you want actionable information and you need a tool that allows you to filter and analyze the data and one that automates reporting and alerts for critical pieces of content so you can look smart. So flexibility and functionality are keys. Since the possible applications for any organization can be varied; Customer Service & Response, Marketing Performance Tracking, Crisis Management, Sales Leads, Issues Tracking….etc., some flexibility is important so the application can grow as you find other uses across the company.

How to Select a Social Media Monitoring Vendor Partner

Learn more about Alterian SM2 Social Media Monitoring at www.alterian.com/sm2