As we stated in our last post, Social Media Monitoring Provider Evaluation, we’ve surveyed the Social Media Monitoring and Listening category’s entrants and experienced them either directly through test-drives or vicariously through the related experiences and research of individuals just like you.

During our research, 4 common and key needs, relative to the category’s current offerings, rose to the surface.

Below is a list of those needs punctuated by a small sampling of the influential and insightful blogs that voiced the representative concerns quite effectively:

1. Consistent and Reliable Data Collection
   • “I’ve begun to notice inconsistencies in the data that different social media monitoring tools produce. The dirty little secret or so it seems is they aren’t all working with the same data sources.” – Ken Burbary
   • “The reality is that while these companies provide you with piles of data and funky visualizations, the profound unreliability of the software means that you have to sit for hours and days and configure the dashboard, refine the data.” – Asi Sharabi
2. Nimble and accurate data filtering
   • “Efficient filtering of topics. This probably seems stunningly obvious, but often it is still poorly done. The ideal tool is a combination of both depth and breadth–it scans all possible media, yet returns only the most relevant results.” – ThreeMinds
   • “In some occasions, I had over 50% irrelevant data coming through my dashboard.” – Murray Newlands
3. Accurate and truly automated sentiment scoring
   • “One company claims it will get sentiment right (which is defined as in agreement with a human customer) about 72% of the time. That sounds pretty loose.” – CNET’s Rafe Needleman
   • “It’s currently time consuming to manually grade sentiment. Even though brand in question only returned 54 posts, it would have taken about an hour to go through each one, read, score sentiment and so on.” – Jason Falls
4. Accurate demographic and geographic segmenting
   • “The problem [with companies that claim this capability] is that it’s not about where you are but which domain you’re using. So reliable geo/regional analysis is, in many cases, impossible to carry or not complete.” – Asi Sharabi

These 4 needs and 2 additional needs below are front and center as we strive to engineer an accurate and automated Social Media Listening Platform.

1. Single Metric – Aggregation of data, measurement and analysis into a single, relevant metric that can quantify a company’s ability to retain and attract customers while pinpointing troubled social media channels, relative to the brand, for immediate action.
2. A reliable and accurate model for measuring online and offline investment against quantified results to achieve an understanding of true ROI.

We’d love to know your thoughts on the needs above or any additional needs we may have missed.

We’re developing an Listening Platform that is of, by, and for the Social Media Marketplace. With the help of voices just like yours, we can speed our progress and refine our offering, creating a best in class, enterprise level social media measurement, monitoring and analysis platform that collects both off and online results and aggregates them into a single metric, the SOCIALtality Score^TM – which quantifies a company’s ability to attract and retain clients.

 

Follow us on twitter for more progress updates and thoughts: @socialtality

Tags: ROI, Social Media Measurement

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 17th, 2009 at 1:12 PM by greatmin and is filed under The Terametric Scorecard. 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.