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.
