Social Media Listening a necessary evil for 2010
Marketing is growing by leap and bounds. Looking into marketplace I see 50,000 Internet Marketing Freelancers and Companies trying to create a listening that they are the messiah of Online Marketing. Seemingly we have all but figured out Internet Marketing. But I don’t find a single dot.com, Ad Agency, Ad Network, or Freelancer who can guarantee me ROI [Return on Investment] forehand. Human mind and emotions is too complex for greatest of the scientists of our times to be captured in a magical equation.
SEO, zillions of Experts have their theory on Optimizing content on Google. Adwords experts claim to have figured of innovative ways to figure our Google Adwords Gaps and Quality Score. We know Rich Media Banners get better click through rates. Facebook application Marketing which came up in late 2008 is already a figured out technology. And when I talk to Social Media listening I am not talking about Facebook and Orkut, Youtube, MySpace Advertising.
Social Media Listening via Collecting Data, Connecting Sources, Converging them into Information.
Let me linger on hindsight behind the background of ROI. ROI depends a lot on how Human Beings react to a messaging and information flow. We are still figuring out innovative ways to capture what Human Behavior and Perception would be to a particular messaging. In my experience of working on campaigns for most of my clients, I always grapple with the infinitesimal know-how of what messaging people need in the market. Marketing has been mostly a PUSH activity for online marketing rather than Listen to the Market and then create a messaging for Online Audience. Yes I do get analysis from the PR Agencies and Research Papers, but unfortunately its overtly influenced by the traditional media [newspapers and magazines], the specialists and critiques that the end result after spending 50 million odd Dollars we get to hear is we were not able to connect to the masses. The masses and population unfortunately don’t speak in the same tone as critiques and specialists.
The normal online user lives on Social Media. There is where I feel the listening should be. If somehow a tool could capture an actual listening for the voices on Social media, brand perceptions we have a game changer and +20% on ROI on day zero, before even conceptualizing the campaigns.
Yes there are syndication networks and online tools which capture conversations through RSS and API’s. But, the million conversations don’t make much information and perception. I have come across tools who tend to make some information out of Social Conversations by generating Heat Maps and Graphs and NLP [Natural Language Processing], but Artifial Intelligence demonstrated by most of these tools is unfortunately less than 50% accurate. Let me explain how this is being handled.
Its a 3C’s [Collect, Connect, Converge] process,
- Collect massive amount of data via RSS feeds, API’s from gargantuan resources like twitter, forums, board trackers, blogs, pings, news, del.ic.our, diggs etc and place it into funnels and categories. Also, tracking how many times the conversation has occurred over a period on how active the topic is.
- Connect i.e. rate the source of conversation and how much buzz it can create on social sphere. If user then rating him via the number of connects he has on twitter, del.ic.ous bookmarks, DIGG profile. If the source is website then basing the rating on the Google Page Rank, Traffic from Alexa and Quantcast, presence in DMoz, Google News, regular visitors etc. New technologies like FOAF Projects and Google Social API’s have slowly crept in showcasing how well a user is connected in online social sphere and providing another dimension to this technology.
- Converging the data into information is the most critical element. Based on the weight-age of connects each tweet, or story has, the conversation is given a particular weight-age. Couple the same with the number of conversations collected in particular period give a bubble or heat map of a conversation. The once above the threshold are given a particular score and are filtered for being passed on to client. This process is fairly automated with minuscule human interference. And here is the gap.
Most of the filtering sources there are rely on automated rules and filters. Human Emotions are hard to quantify and 50% of results from this kinda Convergence are way off the mark. Currently working on developing a Social Media Listening Project. The idea is to capture listening in social media with 3C’s but add very active manual moderation layer to at-least the last two phases, i.e. Connects and Convergence. Manual interface to me sounds indispensable for Convergence. Converging and selecting the pieces of Listening from crap to in-valuable is critical for businesses. Once this Listening can be filtered out, marketing can be easily be created around what people want to listen to giving boost to ROI.
Tags: Online Marketing, Online Marketing Tool, SEO Tools, Social Media, Social Media Marketing