I had the fortunate opportunity to listen to Altimeter Group’s Jeremiah Owyang at an excellent Crimson Hexagon webinar, this week, on how social strategists can understand and overcome measurement woes. Jeremiah shared an interesting quote: “There are more than 145 vendors that do brand monitoring and brand reporting in social media. It’s just too hard to keep up with all these companies and what they are doing.” Thinking through the quote for the day I absolutely agree with Jeremiah’s conclusion. It’s just too hard for Social Media Strategists to keep up with each new social media monitoring tool that launches to deliver measurement and metrics.

However, the growth in social media brand monitoring and brand monitoring tools is not accidental nor an aberration. Social Strategists should expect to see continued growth in the variety and evolution of these tools. Below are two quick reasons why I predict we will see more, not less, measurement and monitoring tools.

Monitoring and Measurement is easy and cheap:
Capturing and aggregating data into charts and graphs is a low cost computing exercise. It is extremely easy develop great brand monitoring tools, especially when there is a large volume of data flowing through Social Media channels. An infinite stream of data will provide an equally infinite approach to presenting and viewing data. Expect to see many more free measurement tools as the volume of data increases as more brands bring their brands into Social Media.

Monitoring and Measurement is NOT strategy and action:
Most social media monitoring and measurement tools provide excellent measurement and analysis, but many don’t go further into delivering the critical additional value that Social Strategists desperately need, daily. These pains include a strategic roadmap of investment and activity, as well as algorithmic, predictive forecasting. To deliver strategy and forecasting would require much more analysis, modeling, and possibly more engagement by social media strategists.

There will always be substantially fewer marketing business intelligence tools that deliver strategic insight and tactical actions for marketers and marketing executives. These are harder to develop and more risky to deploy because they will require more effort and more engagement beyond a pretty chart presentation.

Tags: Social Media Measurement, Social Media ROI, Social Media Strategy, Twitter ROI

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 17th, 2010 at 3:05 PM by Taariq Lewis 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.