Those clever chaps at Edelman Global in New York recently explored the difference between social media monitoring and listening by asking what would come after listening.
The answer is rather simple, conversation. But, the assumption is that social media monitoring works. Whether Search or Social, the market is awash with “monitoring” companies claiming to be able to identify the “authorities”, enabling brands to “listen” to the existing “conversation” and plan campaigns. Or, for the more advanced adjust campaign content in real-time.
But before we move off social media monitoring into how to build content that influences the chosen authorities and spreads to the widest possible audience, there are two problems with the core dataset that typically establishes the most important authorities. And, by the way, the scale of data necessitates the use of tools.
The first problem is that the majority of social media monitoring tools and techniques, at least for English speaking market, are North American based. As such, a genuine authority in the UK market may simply not have the audience to compete with their North American counterparts. At a keyword level this gives a false assessment of the location of authority. This problem is amplified if a client is operating in a niche market.
The second problem is that genuine authorities rarely operate on a single channel. So, unless the social media strategy was formed in 2008, the data Net needs to include the target brand, their competitors, the market, but also the relationship between different channels from the same source.
Here, at ISM, our solution is to define the market space for ourselves before blindly accepting one monitoring “authority map” over another. By establishing our own market space using both Search, Social and traditional media reference points we can add a qualitative brief to the available social media monitoring tools. While this means a variety of tools need to be bolted together, this approach has produced a number of tangible benefits.
By pre-defining the potential authorities we can monitor them as individual sources – identifying what they are talking about, rather than when they talk about a keyword we are interested in. Listening to them as individuals has enabled us to build our content around a genuine community map and offer content that resonates with the authority and their existing audience. Our focus on the audience doesn’t always match our client’s ambition for their messaging but overall we have improved reach and engagement across our client base.
So to the question of what comes after listening, the answer is definitely conversation. But we suggest that there is much more work to construct the context of the conversation. As with many things in Search and Social the tools are a very important part of the overall solution but there is no silver bullet.
