Social Media - Points to Ponder for the Information Professional
Jinfo Blog

By Chris Porter

Abstract

When recently researching an update of social media management tools, regular FreePint contributor Chris Porter sampled quite a number of vendor services. Quite a few aspects struck him as areas where information professional could add value, whether during a vendor selection phase or in subsequent roll-out.

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In recently researching changes to vendors and services in the social media management field, I had the opportunity to sample quite a number of vendor services, either directly or through online demos and videos of the services. Quite a few areas jumped out where information professional could add value, whether during a vendor selection phase or in subsequent roll-out.

Here are some key thoughts and questions for consideration:

How easy is it to look at the right stuff? Some vendors promote only very basic (if user-friendly) searching options; some take at least some steps down the Boolean path; and others offer really extensive Boolean support. Filtering capabilities on results sets also vary widely. Given the amount of content you may have to wade through, it is worth deploying some information-professional expertise to understand just how targeted the initial search setup and subsequent filtering can be.

How deep is that archive - and at what price? There's a lot of social content out there; but holding a long archive for a customer can have a cost for the vendor and may well have an added cost for the user too, so assuming your needs include archive research as well as the current state of the world, make sure you know how far back you can go and at what price.

Pricing based on numbers of keywords is a common model too - so watch out for any catches there, if you will need a lot of search terms to get the results you want.

How wide is that content? For all the buzz about "social", traditional news media is still highly trusted and highly influential - but while you might find a "News" source category in your social media tool, how comprehensive will that be - or will you still need a separate news aggregation service to find the really important stuff?

In a recent test for coverage of a major utility company, I found around ten times more traditional-media news coverage using a traditional big-name news aggregator, rather than an up-and-coming social media tool vendor. (To be fair, the traditional aggregator certainly didn't win the reverse test, on the extent of the social media coverage.)

Expect to take time if you want to get sentimental. Social media tools typically come with automated tools which will score content as positive, negative or neutral, generally coupled with manual tools allowing you to override the automatic selection. Vendors make differing levels of claim about the automated accuracy levels; but you would do well to run your own tests too at an early stage. If you want to use sentiment as a metric, you may find that it is a painstaking, carefully managed manual override process, if you actually want the results to be right.

Have a hard think about what matters, and to whom. When you first run a social media query, expect to see a wide range of content relating to the companies and brands you are tracking. Testing for mentions on a variety of companies, I saw: job postings, traffic reports, individual rants, authoritative independent blogs, pick-ups of company-authored content and much, much more.

It pays to think carefully up-front about which of these things actually matter to your organisation, and which you can just skip - the outputs, reports and outcomes for your organisation will look very different depending on these choices.

Find Out More

To read more about key changes in the social media market, read my Subscription Article "Social Media Monitoring Update - a Market in Constant Motion" where I look at mergers and acquisitions, developments in services, social marketing specialists, and those who focus on listening and research.

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