As a social media agency, monitoring tools have become a valuable component in our toolkit. With a plethora of new tools hitting the market, staying on top of the latest technology and understanding their differentiating factors is a challenge – so here are a few of the questions we think that you need to ask.

1. What’s it for?

Social media monitoring tools can be used for a range of purposes –

• Managing online reputation and risk (brand conversation)
• Consumer insights (topical and trending conversations)
• Research and development (market conversation)
• Competitor analysis and identification
• Influencer identification and social graphing

So, it’s important to choose a tool that is aligned to your priority or priorities.

2. How is it priced?

This is often dictated by the first question. If you’re looking for brand references, you might want to go for a model that is based on a number of keyword queries; if you’re exploring conversations, volume based models might be a more cost effective option.

3. What do I want to see?

The ability to analyse data and how this analysis is presented differs from tool to tool. For example: Visible Intelligence offers key word comparisons across social media platforms and in relation to other brands; Sysomos maps out the words associated to a brand in relation to strength and relationship.

• What information do I need to see? (locations, sites and time scales)
• How do I want to explore and filter the information? (sentiment, keywords, platform, influencers)
• Am I being asked for anything specific from other parts of the business?

4. What about the free tools?

There’s a raft of free tools out there. From Google search filters to Twitscoop, a tool for capturing Twitter mentions; boardreader for reviewing online discussions in forums to socialmention, a service that, as the name suggests, helps you find mentions on social sites.

Whilst we rarely use free tools in isolation, they can help:

• Provide a starting point for further research and analysis
• Identify trends or conversation themes
• Capture information by platform
• Sense check insights

5. Who will be using it?

The resource, business context and surrounding processes are all important considerations in selecting the right tool. Deciding factors include:

• Will the tool be primarily resourced by an agency or inhouse?
• Will it be built into the work process, if so, which?
• What’s the technical capacity within the team?
• Where will the insights fit into the businesses’ processes and procedures?
• Who will respond to online mentions?
• What are the technical or training requirements, if any?

This is just the start of the process. Once the tool is in place revisiting these questions on a regular basis will ensure you continue to get the most from your investment.

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Gone are the days of fluffy explanations. Marketing and communications professionals are increasingly expected to provide measurements, metrics and real time data. Whether it is to interrogate a campaign, set benchmarks or justify investment, the numbers count.

Social media is no different, and it’s not short on numbers.

From Facebook fans (recently valued at $138 each) to online mentions; campaign specific #hastags to re-tweets (and the reach of the re-tweets); it’s quite easy for the numbers to spiral into obsession, and for the meaning of the numbers to get a little lost.

With a view to making it easy to see and digest this information, I have been looking into dashboards, and exploring how these can be of use to us in the social communications world, both in relation to collating and then acting on information.

Enter my current favourite, Geckoboard (an example of a dashboard is above, and there are more on the company’s Facebook page).

Pulling together data from a wide variety of different applications, it appears that I can have all the metrics I want in one place and updating every 15 minutes or more.

Wow. Or maybe not?

Geckoboard does exactly what I was looking for but it also opens a can of worms.  How do we make logical, real connections between different metrics? What metrics does your dashboard user need/demand? How do we ensure a relevant picture is presented? And, from a business perspective, what do those numbers really mean?

There are some big and difficult questions there; but, assuming that the numbers are the starting place for sense-making and benchmarking, here’s a list of considerations that I think anybody wanting to share social media metrics across a wider organisation should explore:

Set up:

• Where do you get this information from currently?

• How often do you need the information updated?

• Do you need the dashboard to just provide the information or does it need to provide a gateway to the detail behind the numbers?

Purpose:

• Do you really need to see live, up to the minute information (monitoring) or is your tool for benchmarking or campaign review (evaluation)?

• Which metrics count? For example, are we interested in site views or Facebook fans or Twitter mentions? – and what do these separate actions show?

• What are the key performance indicators that we are watching?

• How do social media metrics align with communication goals; for example, is a Facebook Like a sign of engagement; or a Twitter click through a sign of engagement?

Integration:

• What systems are other parts of the company using to measure different elements of the business?

• Will the information be part of reporting to your boss and on up the business?

• What kind of action are we expecting in response to the numbers presented? For example: does a lower than average pick up on a campaign #hashtag mean that action needs to be taken to get the Twitter campaign out to more people?

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There are loads of free tools out there designed to provide insight into what is being said about you or the brands and products you work for on the Internet. One such tool that is worth checking out is G’lerts.  Using Google Alerts as the base of the service it provides you with a daily email (example shown on the right) that rounds up what has been happening on your Google search over the past week.  It includes some simple charts as well as the all important links to the stories Google has found for you.

There is also an online dashboard but this is where things start to get a little flaky in my opinion.  One thing to be aware of is that you only have access to the last seven days information (come on it is free).  So do not rely on this to provide you with monthly reporting. The other is that I have only been seeing results for web, no news sites, blogs or Twitter, which I seriously doubt given one of my searches was regarding flu cases this winter.

Yet, if you are using Google Alerts for tracking issues, stories, clients, individuals or anything else, over the recent past, forget the Google Alerts emails and set this up.  Oh, just watch out for that sentiment analysis. We all know sentiment is nigh on impossible for automated systems to get right – no matter what the monitoring tool guys tell you.

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There is much debate about whether social media can generate a return on investment. It is certainly a hot topic given the increasing investment in social media activity.

As a social media agency we work with lots of brands, big and small. All of whom have different expectations from social media. Each initiative is different and each has a different set of expected outcomes. Without a doubt our experience proves that determining ROI requires planning.

Set clear measurement plans

Detailed planning. Really, really detailed planning.

We are presenting a case study at Media Pro this Tuesday. We’re hoping to demonstrate how you can extract the value of social media and convert it into meaningful figures that business groups can understand [and value]. We tell the story of how to plan for ROI through Sony’s Twilight Football activity which recently won a social media award.

The secret to proving social media ROI is based on three fundamental frameworks:

1. Set out your measurements from the start: Plan what you want to measure in the minutiae. Set out the metrics (there are hundreds of social media measurements); determine the KPIs (key performance indicators) and finally outline how you will evaluate. Explore all the options and tie them closely back to your business objectives.
2. Continuous measurement allows you to optimise: Social media is dynamic. It ebbs and flows with the conversations, the interests and trends. Continuous measurement enables you to spot the opportunities to enhance your return. And if you connect up your dots – such as your web analytics to social activity – you can refine your activity and hone in on successful initiatives.
3. Evaluate in detail and set the benchmarks: There is very little detailed data on successful social media activity. But there is no reason not to create your own set of insights. Insight to inform future campaigns. Delving deeper into your initiative you can tie back ROI to specific channels or relationships. Did blogger Y generate leads with a higher conversion rate? did XYZ forum create further social media ripples beyond its own site? And how did these outcomes play into delivering a return on investment.

The value of planned measurement goes beyond proving the immediate ROI. It allows you to set the benchmarks for future initiatives. To understand the optimal social media activity. When we talk about the success of Sony’s Twilight Football, it is the initiatives that came before (over 4 years), the benchmarks and evaluation, that enabled Sony to focus activity and generate an ROI of €12.5m.

And if you are near Olympia on Tuesday the 2nd Nov, do pop in to see the presentation. It is free, and we talk more in detail about how you can plan for successful results.

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Taking a look at the evolution of social media as a communications tool over the past year, it is clear that one thing in particular has changed, businesses now take it seriously and include in their communications strategy.

Brands now automatically lose their shine with customers if they do not allow for direct communication between customer and company. This shift in expectation has lead to the growth in the number of managing directors asking where the company’s Twitter feeds, Facebook pages and YouTube channels are and why can’t we have thousands of fans tomorrow?

With a view to providing a glimpse under the hood at some of these changes over the last twelve months, we have put together our Social Media Lens. The document launches today at Marketing Week Live! For your own copy just click here, all we ask are a few details about you.

We have been very lucky to have some of the UK’s leading practitioners in the social media space support us with the production of Social Media Lens; presenting real world examples instead of last year’s theories. The collection of articles provides a unique view on what has changed, what works, what doesn’t and a variety of tips and tricks for getting social media activity up and running.

Articles in the ebook cover a whole raft of different insights, advice, trends, what is new and coming up in social media as well as some secrets from marketing professionals from major brands including: Sony, Paddy Power, Oracle, Santander and more.

Once you have had a chance to take a read do come back and let us know what you think.

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One of the most interesting changes taking place as the PR industry evolves into an online discipline is the increased emphasis on measurement. In the old days of offline PR, little attention was paid to systematically analysing the relative success of campaigns, because measuring PR is hard to do. Measures that attempted to pin a quantifiable return on investment to PR activity, such as Advertising Value Equivalent were woolly at best.

But that’s all changing and it seems that PR isn’t getting a free ride any more. All of a sudden, acronyms like ROI and KPI are being applied to an industry that has long been used to justifying its budget with a ring-binder full of shiny, laminated press-clippings. There is now a far greater expectation that PR should provide hard evidence of its impact on the bottom line.

There are two things PR agencies can do about this:

• Keep banging on about how the qualitative nature of PR makes it impossible to measure in the same way as other disciplines

• Figure out how we can use all of these new metrics which are available in the online world to put together some kind of robust and repeatable framework for measuring the value of PR activity with some degree of consistency

You might like to take a guess at which of those approaches is likely to win the most new business.

Of course, there’s already a lot of healthy debate and discussion about PR measurement in the blogosphere, and it’s no surprise that a lot of the big names in PR have their own ideas about the most effective approach.

On the one hand, it’s good that there’s so much interest in solving the problem, but on the other hand, it looks unlikely that an industry-wide consensus will be reached any time soon. Obviously, everybody wants to implement a measurement standard that best represents their own strengths, and it doesn’t help that any discussion on the subject invariably gets sidetracked into an esoteric debate about the nature of influence.

Obviously there’s still a long way to go before this is anywhere close to being solved, but at least there now seems to be broad acceptance that rigorous measurement will be key to the PR industry’s future.

However the measurement debate unfolds, I think it’s absolutely key to ensure that the metrics used are properly aligned with the client’s business goals.  All too often, arbitrary KPIs are chosen simply to provide a tick-box for PR staff to show that they’ve done some work, with little consideration into how exactly they help the business achieve its ultimate aims. And that’s a far worse situation to be in than the old days where we relied solely on qualitative reporting, which at least had some kind of value.

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