Social Media Measurement And Monitoring Tools – Social Media Week London

On Friday 5 February, I popped along to a workshop on Social Media Measurement And Monitoring Tools – one of the last events organised as part of Social Media Week London, a week-long conference focusing on all aspects of the still very new and mysterious world of social media. The London event was part of the wider Social Media Week international conference, which took place simultaneously across six cities, including New York, Berlin and Sao Paulo, from 1-5 February 2010.

Coming from a more traditional SEO background, analytics and data are like lifeblood to me. I work on ROI-focused strategies that are 100 per cent dependent on a complete analytics implementation, so I’m used to having a strong quantitative understanding of how traffic is coming to my site, from where and why. Enter the world of social media marketing and it all gets a lot more complicated. Zone works with a number of high-profile media clients for whom social media is of course a hugely important target area, so I was excited to learn more about the tools available in this field and the empirical data they produce.

Conclusion: there certainly are some very impressive tools out there. I watched a few demos and had a chat with a number of suppliers, all of whom had varying unique selling points. Some of the popular tools I repeatedly heard mentioned from within the attending crowd were:

Radian6
A veteran on the market, Radian6 is probably the most well known of the social media measurement tools and has a host of features designed to track and measure community engagement.

Social Radar
Another big player in the market, Social Radar has grown rapidly over the last few years, winning some very big-name clients.

SM2
Now part of the larger Alterian platform after a buyout last year, SM2 has also established itself as a growing player in the market.

Other companies presenting at the talk included: Asomo, Brandwatch, ImpactWatch and White Vector. And it was nice to also see Ivantage giving demos on how to use Google Analytics to its best advantage, with regards to tracking social media.

For me, the most interesting aspect of the afternoon was a lively round table talk hosted by Tim Williams from Media Measurement under the theme ‘Selecting the best tool for the job’. I think the key point that came out of this discussion is that (like so many aspects of internet marketing) social media measurement is less about the tool chosen to undertake the task, and more about the strategy that underlies it.

Each of the tools have widely different price points, some excel in certain areas more than others (for example, Social Radar can’t show trends dating back over 30 days from your subscription, but has some great graphical interfaces, such as its beloved ‘chatter ecosystem’) and all can provide some really great data. In fact, the majority of agencies at the conference admitted to often using four or five of these tools at any one time in order to build a better picture. However, unless there’s a strong underlying human-driven marketing and analytics strategy to work alongside all of this data collection, it can get lost in an avalanche of stats.

With regards to which tool to use, here are a few tips to keep in mind:

- Ask the company to demo the tool using real world data for a site/campaign of your choosing. It they can’t show you the product working in the real world, you have cause to worry.

- Haggle on the price. A lot of these companies are really pushing to win as much market share as possible early on. The market will be looking vastly different in a few years’ time.

- Don’t get blinded by pretty graphics. Not that pretty graphics don’t have their uses, but remember to look beyond the shininess of a tool to the more practical aspects of its implementation.

My final thought
The current social media measurement landscape reminds me a lot of the web analytics market eight to 10 years ago. There are a host of players all competing in the same area, with slightly different offerings but no big names that are really dominating. Enter, you know who: The big G.

As discussed at SMW London, it’s hard to not envision Google watching the market mature before getting its hands on a few of the top offerings and turning them into a free tool, much like Google Analytics.

You can read more on Social Media Week here: http://socialmediaweek.org/