The State Of Social Media Measurement (aka Brand Monitoring and Listening Platforms)

(Photo credit: Matt Hamm)

It’s been about two years since I left the social media measurement space as startup marketing guy at the company most consider the pioneer and leader. While now immersed in the search-technology world, I enjoy keeping up with social media measurement for several reasons: It’s fascinating. It produces insights that surface the human condition. It’s slowly creeping into major business processes, including at my own current startup and the search industry. I also remain close friends with former colleagues and smart people in the social media industry (and only five years ago we didn’t even call it an industry).

Because of my personal history and ongoing interest, I frequently get pitched by emerging measurement providers – not for my business, but for feedback, advice and coverage on this blog. In fact, I had four such encounters in the past eight weeks.

I’m too far removed to offer meaningful feedback on detailed features and functionality of individual social media measurement companies. Besides, there are others who specialize in those sorts of ratings and bake-offs. However, I can provide some macro observations and trends. In fact, I believe my time away, working at a search-technology startup, has helped me better understand this burgeoning space.

Caveat: my observations are not necessarily true of every single measurement company, but probably most. So here are my big ones…

Connecting Data To Action

I’m hopeful for emerging players with strong technology and innovative approaches that connect the dots from data to business action with measurable impact. This void remains a great opportunity (and sometimes sore thumb) in the social media measurement field, and is indicative of the segment’s infancy. Despite gradual technology advancements, most meaningful social media measurement contributions tend to rely heavily on bruit-force human analysis, interpretation and recommendations.

Product Versus Service Agendas

For nearly every measurement player, the dichotomy of living out as both a product and a services company is both prominent and a curse – yet unrealized, and not scrutinized by anyone. Merging these approaches often seems natural and necessary, but ultimately they conflict. Product strategies seek scale and mass production to pool innovation resources into a world-class offering, otherwise unattainable. Conversely, professional services strategies prioritize customization and consulting to solve complex problems with high client-specific value.

The conflict of agendas between product and service philosophies ends up sacrificing optimal resource and investment in either. This results in conservative growth and a retreat to technology-empowered service businesses. There’s nothing wrong with this latter scenario, but it rarely results in a business with a game-changing market impact and massive scale.

The mandate? If you’re going to be a product company, be the best product company and build and sell to the services companies and marketing departments that need your products. If you’re going to be a services company, be the best services company and apply the best products to your service. There are hybrid product-service successes in the technology sector, but they are few.

Product Strategy Most Lucrative, But Most Risky

The social media measurement companies pursuing a purer product strategy have picked the most challenging path. But that strategy is potentially the most lucrative – if they can actually pull it off. In recent demos of social media measurement products, it seems all contenders suffer from at least three common shortcomings. To break from the pack, it will be critical to address these as soon as possible:

Pragmatic Product Strategy. Perhaps most fundamental, nearly every pure productized tool attempts to report many disparate data, but without the discipline of a solid business goal and ROI in mind. Without clear goals or problems to guide development, everything else becomes trivial and cloudy. This is why I believe the most successful social media measurement products will be focused mini-apps that solve very specific business problems – not boil-the-ocean dashboards that inflict featuritis on users, who then are expected to derive value from complexity.
User Experience. Extensive backend data processing lags, confusing navigation, complicated taxonomies and cryptic terminology make most interfaces difficult to use. Additionally, as described above, most offerings fail to seamlessly transition user experience to other existing business processes. These shortcomings create frictions that hinder measurement companies’ sales efforts and customer deployment. These shortcomings also make tedious and expensive training necessary for success. This phenomenon partly explains why free tools designed for everyday consumers are commonly used, even when fancy paid tools are readily available and paid for. The free ones don’t solve all or most problems, but they’re often the most accessible and practical. People gravitate toward simplicity.
Visual Design. Most social media measurement dashboards I’ve seen suffer from poorly designed, amateur Web interfaces and reporting. And I’ve yet to see a post-login welcome screen that is truly a friendly landing page designed to make me feel empowered. Aesthetic is not a nice-to-have; it’s a critical link in the value delivery chain. Poor visual design on otherwise nice technology is like a supermodel with a giant, oozing zit: promising but ultimately a failure. Because customers are human, visual design usually is the first thing to prompt them to engage or shut off.

Semantics

I believe semantics and taxonomies do matter because they influence the internal development of individual companies and their larger industries. Social media measurement still is undergoing growing pains as people jockey over what to call it. Prominent executives, analysts and industry groups have called it multiple things over the years, like:

consumer generated media measurement and analysis
user generated media measurement and analysis
user generated content measurement and analysis
word of mouth measurement and analysis
brand monitoring

“Listening platforms” is the latest buzzword, but I still stick to social media measurement. All these definitions, including the one I use, are too inclusive and general. But I’m sure nomenclature will fix itself when the endgame arrives.

The Endgame

Ten years from now? Social media measurement will be big, but different than how we think about it today. It will find its greatest success by subtly integrating into the morphing DNA of numerous business and decision-making processes.

That’s my take. What’s yours?

Tagged as: Consumer-Generated Media, listening platforms, social media, social media measurement

Terrintokyo

This is an enormously useful post, thank you. I think that human analysis and intuition, as well as clear, attainable ROI goals, are the necessary complement to either the product or service-focused measurement tools: I don't think that will change, so that's where my focus is, as a small business owner.

kate_niederhoffer

Hi Max, as you know I too remain intimately tied to social media measurement, despite not being in the space anymore. Strangely, the more companies I'm exposed to, the more I realize how nascent this space still is. There's lots of good, new technology emerging, but the early pioneers still hold their own - in technology and in unparalleled horizontal expertise.

The part of your post that really resonated with me is where you call out human involvement as the key to success. To use O'Reilly's terminology, this is truly a place where human augmentation is critical. No matter how intelligent a software solution is, listening really requires human interpretation. Scientists inherently know this-- BTW read this month's Wired about Vivek Kundra's efforts to liberate data (data.gov) and the advances expected by being able to merge, integrate, and of course crowdsource interpretation of raw data. Point is: you can only go so far with pure technology and raw data. Likewise, eyeball hierarchical linear modeling and the like is not so effective.

The problem that I see rampant today is overconfidence in people purchasing pure product solutions, failing to adopt strategy, training, and dissemination pathways for findings, simply because the barriers to usage are so low. Perhaps this is a result of what you call out on the sell-side of lacking the discipline of a solid business goal.

maxkalehoff

Kate, smart comment. You sound like a highly intelligent, well-educated consultant at a strategy firm whose customers are Fortune 1000 companies. There's definitely a place for that, and the high level insights and strategy you offer clients in that context absolutely depends on human augmentation. But there are vast, minute, in-the-trench operations that will be influenced by social media which are more clearly connected to mundane business operations. Those are the mini, productized apps I see eventually making a difference. For example, I'm intrigued by simple integration of listening feeds into CRM systems like Salesforce.com or Netsuite -- where companies don't take on social media measurement as some sort of standalone art or high level strategy, but, instead, quietly plug it into a standard, mature business operation and do business better. The answer actually can be simple, and does not necessarily require a boil-the-ocean approach.

Agree, the space is immature.

briantroy

The best part of this post was the last sentence. "It will find its greatest success by subtly integrating into the morphing DNA of numerous business and decision-making processes."

My theory is that this space (call it what you will) will follow a very similar trajectory to that of CRM. Very little of the initial hype will become real-world ROI. The ROI will come from companies - as you put it - integrating it into existing business and decision-making processes. The challenge (as I see it) is for vendors in this space to stop trying to tell them all the questions and all the answers. The only questions that matter are those that matter in decision-making processes that already exist - to the extent this "source" can help inform those processes it will be adopted and generate ROI.

So I totally disagree that "point solution" applications answering specific questions will dominate... as a matter of fact, I'd argue that success will depend on the ability to ask un-anticipated questions and extract information.

maxkalehoff

We agree in many ways, but when I say focused mini-apps, I'm talking about data that automatically, without questions, influence transactions. When that happens, you move closer to a currency. For example, television viewers are bought and sold off of Nielsen currency data, as are keywords on the Google Adwords marketplace. Surfacing unanticipated questions is important is important -- but those are insights, not directly tied to transactions and exchange of dollars.

briantroy

I get troubled by the notion that there will be a ranking/scoring algorithm for Social Media akin to Page Rank or Nielsen - simply because that system will inevitably be mired in the mess that is authority and influence. I get that rank is what the PR/Marketing crowd wants, and I understand why, I just doubt the efficacy of any such ranking.
More to my point, we tend to seek a single "lever to pull" which directly results in revenue (sales) - but that is a myth. The reality is - what generates and keeps customers is consistent execution across a business. As you put it, it is the decision making processes. More importantly, it is the quality with which those decision making processes accurately reflect the needs/wants of the target market across the spectrum of business activities.

Understanding who the influencers/authorities are is important, but it is far more important to do the right things based on the insights gained. Doing that enables the influencers to to carry your message for you with authenticity and credibility. Putting influencers/authorities in your pocket and failing to execute the on the insight is just more top down marketing.

For my money - it is all about the insights applied across the business.

Robert Alaney

Interesting!

I feel like there is a scarcity of good marketing today. Good marketing means which can convert the leads into sales. The only marketing that has moved me in the last couple of years is Social Media Optimization.

Jake Rosen

This is an unbelievably well written post. I agree with almost everything you said, with one exception. I think the ideal situation would be to have 2 branches within a company. One offering the product with activation, maintenance and all other services that go along with that. The other branch would be the strategy/consulting services. The two separate offerings would be acquired with unique contracts, but housed within the same company.

This obviously takes a fair amount of capital, the likes of which only a couple companies can currently pull together, but that's why it is my ideal situation.

Brandon

Great synopsis. ROI and actionable data are clearly the missing pieces in all marketing equations, particularly as it relates to social media. While I agree with Jake regarding the ideal scenario, the reality is that offering product and service under one umbrella is not realistically feasible at this stage of the game. Perhaps it will be attainable at some point in the future, but serving both masters is a formidable task and attempting to do so will likely result in two mediocre offerings.

maxkalehoff

Thanks Brandon. We're on the same page. This conflict of two masters is rarely addressed.

maxkalehoff

Thanks Jake. I suppose it could happen within a holding company approach.
Although, I'd suggest the product side would be less likely to succeed in a
holding company approach, particularly if the holding company is an
ad-agency holding company.

The State Of Social Media Measurement (aka Brand Monitoring and Listening Platforms)

Subscribe

Reader Feedback

Recent Posts

Interesting Links