In the beginning (somewhere between 2003 and 2005), lightning struck the primordial pool of social conversation and ignited the first evolutionary step towards understanding and the ability to measure.

The Rise of Tactical Social Media Monitoring

From that primordial social pool, lurched a new species called Social Media Monitoring Platforms. These simple data aggregators execute searches and track mentions of user-selected key words. While useful for tracking operational metrics (Forrester Wave Q1 ‘09) like volume of mention, extent of reach, etc, the lack of advanced natural language processing limited their ability to provide true strategic insight. As the demands of the environment increased (brands began to leverage monitoring capabilities), this tactical myopia set the stage for a more complex and evolved species.

The Development of Strategic Social Media Listening

Forrester defines these platforms as a technology and analytics infrastructure that mines traditional, online and social sources to extract and deliver insights to [help] shape strategy. The ability to integrate multiple classes of data, coupled with natural language processing, allowed users to range far from the tactical pool and deep into strategic forests. However, the burden of manually inputting large portions of that data and the inability of these systems to automatically quantify performance with hard metrics limited a user’s ability to focus those wanderings on a clear destination or goal.

The Dawn of Social Intelligence

Today companies are growing increasingly comfortable with the idea that the social conversation can be mined for valuable information. As laggards begin to explore monitoring, yesterday’s early adopters are synthesizing information into strategy-driving insight where possible.

Yet, the lack of a widely accepted system for accurately gauging hard performance, across a spectrum of channels, often delivers vague or fuzzy insight – insight that lacks the clarifying correlation to ROI.

At SOCIALtality, we’re developing an automated system that breaks a brand’s outreach down by its communication channels. It then further breaks those channels down by inbound and outbound attributes.

This allows our methodology to score each inbound and outbound attribute individually and then aggregate them into a score for each channel. Each channel score is then aggregated into the brand’s SOCIALtality^TM Score.

This will allow our customers to view a rolled-up gauge of performance, then drill down into individual channel and attribute performance to develop a detailed picture of the underlying factors affecting outreach at every level – or as we like to say — Social Intelligence.

How is your brand or social media consulting company approaching the social media measurement and ROI question? Are you at the tactical monitoring, strategic listening or social intelligence stage? What do you think of our approach to quantifying performance?

We’d love to hear your thoughts…

Tags: Social Media Capital, Social Media Strategy

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 3rd, 2009 at 5:56 AM by greatmin and is filed under Social Media ROI. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.