Back in November of 2009, we wrote a blog post titled “6 Common Needs Unmet by Social Monitoring Tools“.  In that post, we highlighted the following common complaints about Social Media Monitoring tools:

1. Inconsistent and unreliable data collection
2. Clumsy and inaccurate data filtering
3. Either inaccurate or manual sentiment scoring
4. Inability to do advanced demographic or geographic segmenting

We’d like to thank people like Asi Sharabi, Murray Newlands, Ken Burbary and the people at ThreeMinds Organic for inspiring and to some degree, informing that post.  Their original posts are well worth a read.  To their observations and often frustrations, we added two more Social Media Monitoring limitations:

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.

As we continue to meet with prospective clients, the ROI question is the most often cited frustration with social media monitoring tools.  This is a capability that social media monitoring tools will never possess.  Wait, what?  Did he really just . . .yep, he did.  I’ll say it again.  Social media monitoring tools will never provide an understanding of ROI for three reasons:

1. Social Media monitoring tools are designed to monitor first and measure second. Based on user-generated search terms, social media monitoring tools simply direct a filtered flow of data from the social media space to you.  How filtered that stream is remains a subject of debate.  Yes, you can see how many times you or a selected subject were mentioned and if those mentions are increasing, decreasing or flat.  Yes, you can even compare that to competitor mentions.  Does that really give you an understanding of performance?
2. Social Media monitoring tools monitor Social Media. These tools scour the data made available by various blogs, microblogs, sharing sites and social networks.  Very few incorporate and measure more traditional channels.  Yes, some incorporate CRMs, SEO and web analytics packages but few actually integrate those metrics with social media metrics to calculate overall performance.
3. Few customers buy based on a tweet. It turns out that most customers interact with and are exposed to many channels before purchasing.  Yes, they may have heard of a product based on a tweet but, people often need to be repeatedly exposed to something before buying.  While a mention or a tweet may get someone’s attention, it often takes more to get the sale.  While Social Media isn’t often the only purchase driver, it does play an incredibly valuable role in magnifying the power of your other channel efforts.  If you can’t accurately measure cross-channel interaction, you can’t truly understand the ROI of your marketing efforts or measure the value of social media efforts.

SOCIALtality analyzes all channels with a common measurement system, allowing us to provide companies with a better understanding of which channels perform and which channels don’t.  We can also tell you which channels have the biggest impact on other channels and quantify that impact.  The ability to understand performance relationships between channels means that our ROI calculation accurately reflects the customer reality.

Tags: ROI, Social Media, social media marketing, social media monitoring

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 6th, 2010 at 2:34 PM by MattC 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.