10 Top Questions for Contemplating Social Media Monitoring

For companies contemplating social media monitoring, this post analysis is meant as a starting point for integrating such an offer with Social Gastronomy’s Enterprise Social Management consulting services.

The Social media monitoring technologies are not sufficiently mature to be “install and go”; especially if the provider is looking to integrate multiple tools. This will require additional selling, implementing, customizing, and executing to manage the integration of the multiple data stream; which are exponentially more complex beyond single tool selection. Some large brands use up to 16 different tools in its social media monitoring program, we use 10+ for just our social market audit. Adding to the complexity in tool selection is the fact that a strategic snapshot that shows the relevance to the brand and business is different than the tactical dashboard and may require a completely different tools set.

 Additionally, the competitive tool landscape becomes more complicated as provider moves up the “food chain” to sell to new levels. The expectations as to how extensive the monitoring program will become will be dictated by the CMO’s desire to consolidate efforts; ie. Across monitoring for brand, reputation management, customer contact, etc. the provider could find itself competing for a broader base of business against PR, Marketing Communications, and Contact Center firms for the Social Media business. We suspect that this will naturally (already) occur as CMO’s will come to the conclusion that the monitoring and listening capabilities should be centralized and feed data for multi-purposes.

Recommended Planning Steps

Area of Planning	Key Issues	Impact
Business Planning	Expected return Ownership within Organization Measure success What are you really buying Investment required over time Resources Business case Technology investment to support offering	Roadmap will dictate the business and investment requirements. If requirements are more extensive than expected, will cause perception issues as to quality and ability to execute.
Program Management	Pricing Packaging Target customers within organization Tool selection now and future Duplication of data Data cleansing process Start with a core application and add other offerings	Expectations around the offering will dictate whether one tool or many will be required. We are seeing client have more mature requirements in terms of comprehensive information collection and synthesis.
Operation Execution	People Requirements Process Requirements Technology Requirements	How far along the business requirements have gone in preparing to scale the a program
Solution Customization	Add’l types of listening tools Process Training Dashboard Addl tools Packages? Pricing	If you trend as other enterprise social media clients that we have seen, then the customization requirements eventually will be extensive. Preparing for scenarios may allow for better initial package and accelerated scalability
Integration	Process Requirements Customer training Project set-up Policies and procedures setup Roadmap for clients	The enterprise customers seem to be more mature in expectations around integrating offering into their environments and not as tolerant for siloed management. Has impact on operations and customization.

 

10 Top Takeaway Questions to Answer

1. What is the expected hand-off when Social Gastronomy does strategy?
2. What if organization wants other tools to include into the mix?
3. What if monitors in other areas and wants to combine – call center, pr or marcom firm?
4. Reputation monitoring, brand reach, complaints, categories, competitive intelligence, and qualitative analysis – what are you monitoring and why?
5. Sentiment analysis – how leverage, how integrate with other data, how overcome shortcomings?
6. Sentiment analysis challenges and manual review, omissions, volumes, discrepancies
7. What does the integrated tool dashboard look like? Is there a different dashboard for the daily user, weekly manager, and monthly/quarterly executive?
8. Integration into CRM – process, results, so what?
9. How integrate into broader programs, how to use as door-opener for new expanded social media presence management?

10.  Where does this go? Roadmap?