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Posts Tagged ‘monitoring’

Does Social Media Monitoring Need to be 24/7?

We live in a world that never sleeps. On days when I need to drive someone to the airport for an early-morning flight, the highway is teeming with traffic, which makes me ask: “Who are these people and where they going?”

Within the social media world, the same kind of frenetic 24/7 activity is alive and well. People are blogging, tweeting, updating and uploading at all hours of the day and night. You fire up Twitter in the morning to discover that someone who lives in your city has been happily tweeting away at 3 a.m.

One of the strange offshoots of this non-stop activity is that it’s being monitored on a 24/7 basis. It is not unusual for someone to receive a response from a company to a tweet or blog post at any time of the day or time, often within minutes of something being posted.

While there are companies with social media teams that monitor activity, in many cases social media monitoring is being done by one person. This can only mean they are monitoring social media activity pretty much all the time.

It raises the question about whether this is a healthy or necessary thing. Is it really necessary to monitor and respond to social media activity on a 24/7 basis?

Sure, we live in an instant-gratification world but does that mean that social media never sleeps? Is it possible to respond to someone in a few hours rather than a few minutes. Will the world end if a tweet goes unanswered for a little while?

In the short-term, I think it’s a far-fetched to think that social media monitoring will stop being a 24/7 activity. There are too many companies scrambling to establish themselves as social media leaders so they want to be seen as engaged to create a competitive edge. The last thing they’re going to do is take their foot off the gas at this point.

In time, there are are a couple monitoring scenarios that could emerge:

1. Social media monitoring will embrace the call-centre model in which large teams will work in shifts to provide a company or companies with the services they want on a 24/7 basis.

2. Some companies will realize that social media doesn’t needs to be monitored but not all the time. They will devote resources for a large part of the working day but have a period of time in which social media activity happens without them watching. When the working day starts, they will deal with any issues then.

By Mark Evans - August 26th, 2010 - 7 Comments »
Tags: 24/7, monitoring, Social Media
Posted in Social Media

The Oil Leak Has Been Plugged, But The Talk Continues

On April 20th an explosion occurred on British Petroleum’s (BP) oil drilling rig known as Deepwater Horizon. The explosion caused Deepwater Horizon to sink into the ocean, which in turn broke a pipe causing oil to leak into The Gulf of Mexico. This leak went on for about three months and is being dubbed one of the worst man-made disasters ever. Last Thursday BP finally managed to plug the pipe and stop the oil from flowing out into the ocean.

If you saw any kind of media around this oil spill you may have noticed BP was taking a lot of criticism from everywhere. We thought it would be interesting to see how this event affected their public image in the online social space using our social media monitoring and analytics platform, MAP.

In order to get a fair assessment, we broke our study into three separate time periods; the beginning of the year up to the date of the oil rig explosion (April 20th), the period the leak went on for (April 20 – July 15) and the past week since they plugged the leak.

From the beginning of the year until April 20th there was no shortage of talk going on around BP. Looking at this time period we can see that BP was mentioned in almost 93,000 blog posts, over 202,000 forum posts and in about 244,000 tweets. In this time period we also can see that BP was in good favour of those discussing them with a 76% overall favourable sentiment rating.

Then the day of the explosion came. On April 20th Deepwater Horizon sank and oil started to pour out of the well into the Gulf of Mexico until it was finally plugged up almost three months later. During this time the world couldn’t stop talking about the British oil giant. In the course of this period there were around 602,000 blog posts, 860,000 forum messages and a whopping 4.6 million tweets. This time period also saw their favourable sentiment percentage drop more than 20%. The most drastic change here comes from the negative sentiment around BP rising from 22% to 46%.

Now that the leak has been capped and the oil has stopped flowing into the ocean, there might be speculation that talk and criticism of British Petroleum may have calmed down. Our analysis shows that this not the case. Granted, the leak was only capped a week ago, but talk about it has not seemed to slow down. In the past week there has been over 55,000 blog posts, 42,000 forum mentions and almost 528,000 tweets about BP. Most interesting is that there were more tweets about the company in this last week than there were in the first four months of the year. Also, despite the worst being over (the actual leaking), the overall sentiment of BP has not changed much. The overall sentiment rating still stands at 54% favourable. However, while negative sentiment has not gone down, we did see a slight rise in their positive sentiment from 16% to 19%.

With their positive sentiment on the rise it will be interesting to look again at these numbers in a few months to give a roughly equal time period of measurement and to let the clean up of the spill take it’s affect on both the Gulf of Mexico and the general public talking about it. If BP handles the next few months properly, they may be able to swing the public’s opinion back in their favour. Only time will tell.

By sheldon - July 23rd, 2010 - 1 Comment »
Tags: analytics, BP, British Petroleum, MAP, monitoring, sentiment, Social Media, sysomos
Posted in Samples, Social Media, Technology

Social Media: Man & Machine; Not Man vs. Machine

Over the weekend, the social media landscape was dominated by discussions about how social media monitoring needs to have people involved in the process to be effective and successful.

- Jason Falls had a well-read post, “Where Social Media Monitoring Services Fail”
- Roger Harris suggested on “Twitter Thoughts” that social media will “shift away from technological solutions and to the human element”, and
- Tatyana Kanzaveli did a post on the difference between social media analytics and analysis.

On the surface, it’s difficult to tell why this “man vs. machine” discussion emerged in multiple places but it may have to do with the fact that social media monitoring and analytics are seeing major traction as more people and companies start to embrace tools to help them make sense of all the conversations taking place.

While 2009 saw healthy adoption, the past few months have seen a major spike in interest. Companies that weren’t even thinking about social media monitoring a year ago have become enthusiastic users and customers.

Within a growing number of large companies, social media monitoring is becoming an integral part of their marketing and sales operations.

As social media monitoring services and technology mature and evolve, it is also prompting people to ask where humans fit into the equation. If technology is doing all the monitoring, what role do humans play?

In a nutshell, social media monitoring at its best is a beautiful marriage between man and machine. The technology collects the conversations taking place, aggregates, organizes and presents them in a user-friendly way, and then gives people the ability to arrange, filter and manage it to meet their strategic and tactical objectives.

At the same time, social media professionals can use their experience and expertise to layer intelligence, perspective and insight on top of the social media data.

When you think about it, neither side can be successful or effective without the other. The technology is interesting but not useful or valuable without people to do something with it, and people are only able to do a limited amount of monitoring without the assistance of technology to sift through millions of conversations.

All the chatter about how people need to be involved in the social media process makes complete sense, although it’s certainly not a revelation or anything that hasn’t been part of the mix.

It may have to do with the fact that social media monitoring is getting more popular and, as a result, attracting more attention.

By Mark Evans - April 5th, 2010 - 1 Comment »
Tags: analytics, monitoring, Social Media
Posted in Social Media

Using Social Media for Competitive Intelligence

The soft and fuzzy side of social media dominates the spotlight – social media is about about having conversations, engaging with people, and building relationships.

If there’s a dark side of social media that isn’t mentioned often, it’s how social media can also be used for competitive intelligence to pursue a rival’s customers or potential customers.

It’s not that this activity is evil or nefarious, it’s just that it’s not a happy, kumbya kind of thing.

When you are looking for weaknesses among rivals such as complaints about their products and services, and inquiries from people who might be interested in what they’re selling, it means operating in the social media shadows.

Truth be told, there’s as much value to focusing on gathering competitive intelligence as there is monitoring your own products, services and customers.

Customers are talking about their desires, needs and issues on Twitter, Facebook and blogs so why not take advantage of all this information to create a strategy built on leveraging the weaknesses of competitors. If your rivals are offering a window of opportunity, it makes complete sense to use social media to take advantage of it.

So, what are the basics for collecting competitive intelligence? Here’s a few tips:

1. Monitor popular keywords within your industry. For home renovators, it could be “renovations”, “home improvements”, “DIY repairs” or “home projects”

2. Keep a steady eye on competitors to see what’s being said about them. In particular, focus on people who are complaining about bad products, service or customer service. Then, step in by offering advice or help, while shying away from trying to sell them something.

3. Look for conversations about trends within your industry. For home renovators, it could be chatter about new kitchens, bathrooms or energy-efficient appliances. Then, you can participate in the conversations by providing advice, insight and recommendations.

There’s a goldmine of competitive intelligence within the social media landscape. Spending some time on the dark side could generate some good business opportunities.

By Mark Evans - March 3rd, 2010 - 2 Comments »
Tags: competitive intelligence, monitoring, Social Media, tips
Posted in Social Media

Can You Scale Social Media?

As more companies embrace social media, a reality is the amount of time and effort required to nurture, support and expand activity begins to expand.

Blog posts need to be written, external blogs need to be monitored and commented on, and shared; Twitter has to be updated, conversations need to happen (often in real-time, 24×7) and followers/friends need to be managed and monitored; content and updates for Facebook have to happen and be managed; and videos need to be created and uploaded; and the list goes on.

The question is: how you support all of this activity? If the answer is simply adding more people, then social media programs become increasingly more expensive, making it more difficult to achieve ROI. In the short-term, this is a strategy adopted by many companies because they’re scrambling to keep up. As a result, they don’t have the resources or time to create new, more efficient ways to manage their social media activities.

So, what’s the solution? How do you scale your social media programs without scaling your expenses?

There are two reasonable and feasible answers.

First, you leverage technology as much as possible without creating an automated social media machine that spits out content with no personality or people behind it. This happens by using social media monitoring and measurement services, as well as tools that let you update multiple social media platforms at the same time such as Ping.fm. This lets you stay real and have conversations led by a small group of employees, while technology powers much of the behind-the-scenes work.

The second approach is engaging people within the organization beyond your social media team. The social media team acts as a quarterback, while encouraging employees to create a healthy amount of the content needed to maintain a vibrant social media presence.

For example, blog posts can be written by a variety of people willing to share their insight and domain expertise. IBM, for example, has more than 13,000 internal bloggers, who operate using 12 straightforward rules. Employees can also be involved in support Twitter, Facebook and other social media activity. This can be done by participating within corporate-run tools or their personal accounts.

In a sense, companies can outsource social media to employees rather than having a large social media team that tries to do everything.

So, the answer to the question of whether social media can scale is “yes” – although it does require an embrace of technology and internal resources.

By Mark Evans - November 27th, 2009 - 3 Comments »
Tags: blogs, monitoring, scale, Social Media
Posted in Social Media, Technology

Say Hello to Heartbeat 2.0

Since Heartbeat made its debut in June, it has received an extremely enthusiastic reception, attracting clients from the around the world looking for a user-friendly, robust and flexible social media monitoring service.

To ensure that Heartbeat continues to stay ahead of the pack, we’re excited about the launch today of an upgraded version, highlighted by the integration of Facebook and a new look and feel. Here’s a short video about Heartbeat’s features.

Sysomos Heartbeat Video.

Many of the changes and improvements were made after we received valuable feedback from customers such as Shell Oil, Roche, Sony Ericsson, Ketchum and Hill & Knowlton, who asked for new ways to monitor social media conversations, including key metrics and built-in engagement.

“The new version of Heartbeat demonstrates how Sysomos is pioneering the evolution of this industry by listening to customer needs, and then developing innovative tools to support social media professionals,” said Nick Koudas, Sysomos’ president and chief executive.

We’re particularly excited about being to integrate Facebook into Heartbeat. Heartbeat users can now monitor conversations happening on Facebook, and directly manage their public or private Facebook Pages. This offers superior flexibility so clients manage their communities in a fully secure and flexible way.

We’ve also really pleased with Heartbeat’s new and improved design that makes it even more user-friendly.

But don’t let Heartbeat’s elegance and intuitiveness fool you; under the hood, there’s sophisticated and leading-edge technology that powers an industry-leading suite of features such as demographics, geo-location, text analytics and automated sentiment.

As important, Heartbeat is a cost-effective solution that will meet your social media monitoring needs and budget.

By Mark Evans - November 19th, 2009 - 3 Comments »
Tags: heartbeat, monitoring, Social Media, sysomos
Posted in Announcements, Technology

Posts Tagged ‘monitoring’

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