outside-in

Time vs value of social media monitoring

I posted a question on Twitter this morning about balancing the cost and value of social media monitoring. I was interested both in the reaction that this tweet would get, and also in what others in the industry think about this issue.

 

What I found was interesting: first, I did get some great and detailed responses, by telephone from media monitoring agency Cision and a blog post from Social Media Guru Drew Benvie. Secondly, almost accidentally I threw up the limitations of Twitter for this sort of conversation. 140 character is just too short for some things.

 

My initial question “Does anyone have advice on balancing value of social media monitoring with time/cost of doing it? How can I show ROI to my clients?” was posed following a very interesting meeting with a potential supplier – I’ll leave them anonymous for now as I’m not sure they want to launch their product to the wider world just yet. In 140 characters it is difficult to convey the real thrust of the question. What I’m increasingly thinking about is how do we, as agencies, balance the undeniable value of monitoring what is going on in social media with the sheer time it takes to do it.

 

I could quite easily spend the whole day monitoring Twitter, Facebook, various blogs and feeds, forums and news sites on behalf of my clients. And I’d certainly uncover some opportunities, perhaps head off some threats and generate some real insights. As Drew points out in his detailed response; the ROI of this does depend on what you want to measure and why. Certainly we’ve found more ‘coverage’ and conversations about our clients by doing this, spotted issues and topics to which we can authentically contribute and got a better ‘feel’ for what real consumers (of stories or of products) want to talk about. But, has it been cost effective us of our time and our clients’ fees?

 

The issue is the balance between the ‘information farming’ – simply sucking up mentions and comments – and ‘value hunting’ – using that information to advise clients and deliver actions that use it to deliver reputational or sales value. Finding the tipping point between doing enough monitoring and simply ‘lurking’ for its own sake is the challenge. Getting enough new opportunities (be they insights, opportunities, coverage or invitations etc) for the effort put in - and being able to justify it to the client is at the heart of the ROI calculation.

 

I use a number of social media monitoring tools (mostly free, but some more sophisticated paid services) and although these do make it easier to find and track conversations I do find that there are a number of limitations to them all:

 

• How can I be sure of their reach – are they really picking up everything I need?
• Conversely, how do I filter out ‘false positives’ or just meaningless mentions?
• Can I trust their influence calculations –everyone has different algorithms most of which are open to interpretation?
• Most give raw data with little interpretation or insight
• Ultimately, do I trust what they are telling me, and am I willing to put my own reputation at risk using their data?

 

All of which means that it comes down to me and my teams to analyse the ‘fire-hose’ of data that monitoring delivers and try and turn it from a deluge of conversations that confuse rather than clarify into solid PR/communications advice and activity.

 

How do I do this cost effectively? Social media is, as many commentators have noted, a full time job. The trouble is I already have a full time job advising clients on their reputations and communications strategies – of which social media is just one part.

 

Do I have dedicated ‘researchers’ that monitor and analyse for all my clients and feed first cuts of insight to account teams to action? Or should everyone spend a percentage of their time doing it? Should we replace offline clipping services with online monitoring? Is monitoring ‘part of the service’ that clients expect (and thus part of the standard retainer) or can it be charged separately. If so what do they expect to pay – my experience is (unfortunately) that many feel that social media is in some way a cheap option. When presented with bill for the activity listed above many feel that they can’t justify the spend, hence my initial question.

 

So no answers, although I am grateful to all those that responded and I do feel that I have moved close to a solution. I think this is a key challenge for our industry and that there are no easy answers but that rather this is something we are all going to have to grapple with for some time.

What makes a good corporate blog?

I've recently been doing some work for a number of clients looking at good and bad practice in corporate blogs. It seems that they've become de-rigeur for many organisations, but the quality is extremely variable. Specifically, I was asked to advise on the sorts of content and the authorship of a corporate blog.

There are no hard and fast rules, but this excellent post outlines some best practice. I've also noted some things that I've seen that seem to work:

• Real people writing. Identified with names and photos. As long as each has a distinct voice, and there aren't too many, I see no harm in having multiple authors.
• An insider's view. This is one area which few corporate blogs to well. Rather than just spout corporate comms messaging via another channel, use the blog to give a behind the scenes view. Who did you meet on the floor of the industry conference, what did customers say to you last week, how did you arrive at a certain decision? You could also add snippets of news that are too small for formal press releases, or perhaps additional information that did not make the main release but adds colour or insight. Obviously this needs to be tempered by what is commercially (or legally) sensitive, but interesting anecdotes make a blog different from the bland corporate channels.

An industry view. Rather than just talk about the things you and your companies are doing try and take a  wider view of the things important to all the industry.

With a corporate blog you are effectively disintermediating the media to reach your audience directly, which means you have to take on the journalist's role. That means being very clear of the audience you are trying to reach, and creating content that is above all interesting and exclusive! The trap, I believe, is to try and treat the corporate blog as if it were a old-style newsletter. Building a publishing schedule is fine, but it can force writers into rigid format -I need to write a customer story, or a product release or opinion piece for the blog. All these tend to be too long, to controlled and too corporate to work on a blog. The blog ends up just reproducing the sort of content that can be found elsewhere on the site.

Brands such as Sun and Cisco are rightly recognised for comprehensive and insightful blogs, although my personal view is that much of their interest and reputation derives from who is writing rather than what is written. Often it is smaller organisations that have the most interesting bloggers. People who are keen to make an impact with their views.

Two Harvard clients that I think have really interesting blogs are Arbor Networks and OpenPages. These guys use their blogs to air personal views, provide tidbits of information and enter into conversations that are perhaps only tangentally related to their business. They are interesting in their own right - and very readable.

So to condense my response to my clients into two words of advice - be interesting.

 

Synched up

I have 100 odd followers on Twitter, a handfull of people that follow my updates on Social Median, a fair number of friends on Facebook and business contacts on LinkedIn. So what?

I've spent the last few days linking these various social media sites and applications The question is why? How much of this is simple ego-building? Or is there a real benefit in having all these elements linked together. What does it give me as a PR person?

Certainly it is a window on the world. Picking up news, tidbits and leads via various channels is useful. I can also use these channels to ensure that coverage I gain for my clients is shared, and that Web 2.0 outlets, including individual bloggers have access to the content we produce. But that in itself is a bit of a betrayal of the authenticity of my voice on line.

But am I really reaching anybody that has any influence, that I could not have reached in other ways? What's more, does the channel itself actually mean anything? It is likely that Twitter is a fad and will soon give way to something else; so all my efforts at creating witty 140 character comments to build a following will have been wasted. The same may be true of LinkedIn, Facebook etc.

So what's the point? I'd suggest that what is important is participation. The actual channels themselves will come and go, but the practice of deleivering good content that contributes to a real conversation is important.

This is the real change in PR: moving from one-way, controlled distribution of information to open, honest interaction. It's a hard shift to make - and so the more practice we get the better.