I'm quoted in New Media Age...
It's in an article in last week's issue entitled Social Media Analytics. Sadly a subscription is required to read the whole thing; I wonder how much traffic they actually get to older features? Be very interesting to know whether it is really worth locking all that content away. I digress, here's what the article covered:
"As people spend increasing amounts of time conversing on social networks, monitoring what they’re saying about your brand is crucial. So what tools are there to help you listen in?"
Here's what I said:
'Another popular paid-for product is Brandwatch, favoured by Mark Higginson, Head of Social Media at search agency iCrossing, for being one of the most cost-effective solutions available. He says iCrossing tweaks the network of sites crawled and reported on to match its sector knowledge, combining this with analysis. "We call our quantitative and qualitative research a ’stories and numbers’ approach. It’s through this narrative we ascertain what content to create for which audience and who it’s best to approach in those networks in order to gain the greatest share of available attention."'
It's interesting to read what other people had to say, particularly those that favoured Radian6. They've revamped their dashboard since I last tried it out; all well and good but I remember being pretty unimpressed with the quality of the actual data collected, although given how quick they are at responding to blog posts about them there must be something to be said for it. Andrew Girdwood of Bigmouthmedia is quoted as saying:
'... that the data supplied by Radian6 is "pretty rudimentary" and comparable to that from some of the free tools, but its front end is "sexy". “If you’re preparing social media reports to show someone else, there’s a lot to be said for a package that will wrap it up and can be presented to the board. Sometimes you’re paying for that.'
I would recommend in the strongest possible terms that you spend your budget on human analysis and insight over an expensive tool with weak data but pretty charts. At iCrossing our reports are generally bespoke, the size of client we deal with means we need to be flexible enough to fit in with existing reporting and a self-serve dashboard just doesn't serve that need. Also, as I say above, this analysis does not exist in a vacuum; it needs to be acted on and that requires it to be substantiated.
There is also an emphasis from other commentators on the importance of real-time reporting. This is actually a distraction from the core features you need. There are exceptions but this level of response is really only applicable to activity around your own profiles, which is simple enough to do. Until online social behaviours become more embedded most people I speak to say that they would find a brand responding to them directly around something they've said online that did not specifically occur on a brand-managed property as more akin to stalking than useful customer service. Analytics tools should assist you in gathering useful data in aggregate, from which you can derive intelligent and considered insights. They should not encourage you to make unnecessarily rapid responses.
If you are interested in real-time social results Google launched this feature about the same time this New Media Age article was coming out. It's available from the regular search results. Just click 'show options' above the first item on the search results page, then click 'updates' in the section entitled 'all results'. This will give you a timeline you can scrub through as well as mentions as-they-happen. It's a really nice implementation.
Essentially all analytics tools are search engines with a few useful filters on the data. They have an index of sites to crawl, process the data collected and allow the user to filter the results. It's a hard job and there's only one business out there doing it outstandingly well and that's Google. Despite millions invested, the most intelligent engineers and an ever-expanding cloud of hardware even their results have significant flaws. It is a tough task to condense meaning from the vapour of nuance where language is concerned.
