ImpactWatch Blog

• Three ways to act on your social media monitoring – Social Media Today

• 52 Questions To Ask When Hiring A Social Media Company – Outspoken Media

• Six real ways to measure social media – Meme Burn

• How ‘BT Sarah’ spies on your Facebook account – Daily Mail. [The Daily Mail is often silly-bazilly but this is clearly meant to alarm readers who are less web-savvy. I propose higher webucation.]

• Revolutionizing Corporate Communication: 6 Tips for Integrating Social Media – Huffington Post

• What if Social Media Isn’t Working? Then What? – Sysomos

• 5 Questions You Need to Ask Yourself When Creating a Social Media Report Template – Lauren Fernandez

• PR measurement was never meant to be an exclusive club – Rebecca Denison

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Photo: Bluedharma

The Daily Mail has stirred the pot again by suggesting that companies are spying on customers who post negative comments on social media sites.

I work for a media monitoring company and I have for a really, really long time. So it makes sense that I would be in favor of…well…monitoring media. But I think in this situation, most customers understand and even appreciate what companies are trying to do by engaging them through social media. The real problem seems to be the subset of customers who are misinformed about the nature of social media.

The thing about posting information publicly is that the information is then PUBLIC. That means anyone can read it. If you sign up for an interactive forum, like Twitter, that means that you are making yourself available to be contacted by the very public that is reading your publicly available posts.

So I think the issue here is one of education. People need to know what they are agreeing to when they use social media sites and what their options are for limiting contact with the public. For instance, they could set their Facebook profiles to block everyone but friends. This way they are not posting publicly nor inviting contact from the public. If it’s one way communication they are looking for, blogs can be set-up to disallow commenting. Or if they really want to vent privately to friends, email works well.

There are a lot of different broadcasting and interaction options available online and I think the internet needs to do a better job of educating users on what those are. Maybe a mandatory mini-tutorial when you sign up for Facebook or a new blog account. Maybe Twitter can change the “What’s Happening?” box to the “What’s Happening That You Want the Whole Freaking World to Know About?” box. Subtle AND effective.

And to companies – for goodness sake, don’t abuse the privilege. You are so lucky to have this opportunity to see into the hearts and minds of your customers. By all means, ask if you can help. Offer a coupon or discount when someone compliments your product. Do not contact customers who do not mention your company by name or ask specifically for the service you provide. “I like jellybeans” does not mean “please contact me jellybean-makers.” You will ruin it for everyone, I promise.

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Photo: Samuel Mann

Obviously social media has been steadily growing in popularity these past few years so it’s hardly shocking that companies taking notice. But a survey of 600 companies found that 73% are using a tool to measure their social media activity and reputations. That’s pretty good.

27% of the companies admit to doing no measuring whatsoever, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t monitoring (Guys? Please tell me you’re monitoring.) A little over half of the companies have paid for media planning and competitor analysis services.

Companies are also shifting resources from technology to staff. Internal staff now accounts for 53% of web analytics budget, compared to 42% last year, while technology spend has dropped 8% to 30% of total budget. Hopefully this shows that companies are finding effective tools that put the right data in the hands of employees who can act on it… and it doesn’t mean that companies need additional employees to sift through a bunch of unfiltered data (Guys? Please tell me you’re filtering).

Either way, companies are no longer shelling out for analytics that pile up without being analyzed or implemented in business planning. These numbers also show that media monitoring is being recognized as essential and included in the overall analytics budget and strategy.
-Stuff the researchers pointed out:

-) Two-thirds of companies (65%) have paid for online survey technology, while just over half (51%) have paid for media planning and competitor analysis services. Despite the increased importance of the mobile channel, only 12% of companies are paying for mobile analytics tools.

-) A quarter of companies (26%) are using multivariate testing (MVT) and optimisation tools, and this is the best-performing business tool from a return on investment perspective. Two thirds of companies (66%) using MVT report a definite bottom-line improvement to business performance.

-) Lack of budget and resources is the most significant barrier to an effective online measurement strategy, according to 57% of companies surveyed. This is now more of a problem than last year, increasing by 12% from 45% in 2009. The biggest factor cited as a barrier by agencies is still the lack of understanding by clients, although this is now less widely seen as a problem compared to last year.

Econsultancy and Lynchpin 2010 Online Measurement and Strategy Report
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Ask why there isn’t a cute graphic to accompany the post.

• 46% of B2B Marketers View Social Media Engagement as Irrelevant - Hubspot

• 13 Truths About Social Media Measurement – Altitude Branding

• Outsourcing Customer Response: Transactions vs. Relationships – Radian6

• Social media monitoring review 2010 – the final report from Fresh Networks  and a review of the report by Marshal Sponder who has also done tool comparisons – Some thoughts about Turning conversations into insights: A comparison of Social Media Monitoring Tools by FreshNetworks

• Automated sentiment analysis gives poor showing in accuracy test – Research Magazine

• Human Analysis in Social Media Monitoring: 5 Simple Steps to Navigate a Sea of Records – Social Conversations

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A Typical Case of Mediamonitoringitis

I’m not talking about hurting your reputation, hurting your bottom line or hurting your feelings. I mean injuries. Literally. Physically.

I’ve done media monitoring for 8 years now. It involves a lot of typing and a lot of clicking. I started wearing a wrist brace (a cute gray and pink one for girls) years ago when I got mouse-thumb reminiscent of the aches caused by 16 hours of Zelda. The wrist brace is amazing. I force all of our analysts to wear them prophylactically to avoid getting to the point where they have pain. And it really works…

Sadly, it turns out that I have a whole other hand to bang up. When I lost feeling in my pinky and ring finger, I googled it (duh) and found that it is a common result of putting weight on your elbow. You know how you put your elbow on the desk and rest your head in your hand? Stop doing that. I stopped doing that. It still didn’t go away so I went to the doctor.* She said there are other ways to tick off that nerve that runs across your elbow – your “funny bone” – besides leaning on it. One of those ways is banging on the keyboard for 12 hours a day for 10 years. Huh.

The doctor ordered me to give up keyboards and mice for at least 5 days to give my hand a rest. When I got home, I got on the computer (oops) to research workstation ergonomics. I had to find some organization of equipment that would let me keep working without pain and injury. Then I looked down at my keyboard and saw…

WARNING! To reduce risk of serious injury, read Safety & Comfort Guide provided with product and at www.hp.com/ergo

Seriously? I’ve had this computer for 2 years and I have NEVER noticed that before. So I went there. I went to the CDC.

Your Computer Is Trying to Tell You Something

I went to OSHA. I went to the freaking Department of Defense (they like white papers). I found a ton of information. Most of it is stuff I had heard or read before but I wasn’t actually doing. My office chair was not in an ideal position. I was using a laptop instead of a separate keyboard. I rest my wrists on the keyboard while typing.

I’m sure that many of you reading have similar habits and it doesn’t really seem like a big deal because your fingers haven’t been asleep for a month. But you might think about not letting it get to that point. If you do media monitoring, you are doing a lot of typing. You’re clicking, you’re copying, you’re commenting. You’re probably asking your hands to do things they weren’t designed or conditioned to do.

It would be silly to tell you to stop monitoring your media coverage (we still want your money), but there are little changes you can make to ensure that you can do it comfortably for a long time. I think OSHA has the best resources, including a thorough checklist you can use to make sure you have a good set-up.  Happy Clicking.

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*Please visit your physician should you lose feeling in any body part(s).

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Keyboard photo: BennyLin0724

Hand photo: N1NJ4

OK, more like top posts of the month at this point. I have been out for vacation and on the disabled list these past few weeks. I know, I know… I missed you, too. But I did keep up with the best in media monitoring news and here it is:

• Why You Shouldn’t Trust Automated Sentiment Scoring – Jason Falls

• Measuring the ROI of social CRM no easy task – SearchCRM

• The Debate About Automated Sentiment Analysis – Seth Grimes/ Intelligent Enterprise

• Are we there yet? Diagnostic versus objective social media metrics – Christopher S. Penn

• Social Media Expert: Free Social Media Monitoring Tools – Social Media Expert

• Social Media Monitoring – Vesta Digital

• Marketing Analytics: How Do You Decide What to Measure? – Hubspot

• Using Social Monitoring to uncover the Analytics of Geolocation – Smart Data Collective

• Why is clippings still a PR metric? – Hill & Knowlton

• 5 Reasons Your Social Media Strategy Will Fail – Adweek

• Media Measurement: A Long Term Investment – BurrellesLuce

• Longitudinal Social Media Monitoring - BrandSavant

• PR people can measure social media. We just need to learn – Next Communications

• Social-Media Listening vs. Social-Media Monitoring: Truly Connecting, or Merely Collecting? – Marketing Profs

• I’m 100% Convinced that 50% of PR and Social Media Metrics Are Wrong – Katie Paine

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Soluto, which bills itself as “anti-frustration software,” beat out 19 other start-ups to win the $50k prize at TechCrunch’s Disrupt Conference this week. This was especially timely for me since I’ve had two incidents this week where Microsoft’s Diagnostic tool popped up to inform me that Office “seems to be crashing a lot.”

Yes, I’d noticed that as well. After letting MS do a checkup on my machine, I was disappointed both times that it had no suggestions as to what the problem might be. I agreed to let MS upload the data from my desktop, to be added to its database of information from other users that it has failed to help.

Soluto seems to use the same steps as MS’s diagnostics – first checking the programs that are using CPU and memory capacity, then compiling this data from a community of users, to draw conclusions about when and why the system is slowed or stalled. Beta invites are currently delayed due to the influx of interest from TC Disrupt. When it’s open, I would love to see if Soluto can achieve results where MS’s own tools come up blank.

One of the coolest features is that Soluto will be making its aggregate data public. The software makers who are responsible for these technological bottlenecks will be able to see which experiences users find most frustrating. I’m personally interested in how the tool will attribute these issues. Will user error be a category? Can the tool determine when Johnny is storing 5,000 mp3s or when Susie hasn’t run defrag in 3 years?

In all honesty, I know exactly why my computer slows and shuts down programs. I’m a personal computer’s worst nightmare. I have 10 programs and 30 browser tabs open. I’m downloading, uploading, switching between programs and banging on the keyboard like Rick Allen.* I should be using a workstation, not a laptop. I’m sure there are a lot of “power users” out there who are biting off more data than their specs can chew, and I wonder if/how this will be represented in Soluto’s “PC Genome” database of frustrations.

Anyway, it sounds cool and maybe it can help my mother-in-law figure out “what that little spinning rainbow thing means” on her Mac.

Here are the 19 startups that didn’t take the prize but that are worth checking out (they did beat out a few hundred other entrants). Descriptions via TechCrunch:

• Audioo: The Audioo platform allows users to auto-stream, publicly share, and store voicemails from handsets and services including Google Voice.

• Appbistro: Appbistro is an application marketplace for Facebook pages.

• Art.sy: Art.sy is the destination to discover and share original fine art online.

• Betterment: Betterment is intended to be a replacement for your savings account, allowing you to invest in two portfolios.

• ChompOn: ChompOn allows any business to run its own social flash sales.

• Compass Labs: Compass Labs is a social e-commerce ad network for Twitter.

• Fluidinfo: FluidInfo is a Wikipedia of databases – a shared online always-writable cloud database.

• Geotoko: Geotoko is a promotional campaign management platform for geo location based services.

• Keenkong: Keenkong is a social media monitoring engine that extracts why people are talking, what are they talking about, who they are and then segments messages accordingly.

• Live Matrix: Live Matrix is a guide to video events and streams taking place on the web.

• Movieclips.com: Movieclips.com is an online database of movie clips.

• NoiseToys: NoiseToys is a software company uses games and competition to encourage users to share and discover music.

• Off & Away: Off & Away is an online travel site that offers exceptional travel experiences in fun and unique ways.

• Publish2: Publish2 allows newspapers to create a comprehensive, customized newswire for print.

• Textingly: Textingly provides a texting address, a web management console and apis for businesses to create immediate, two-way dialog with their customers.

• Tickreel: Tickreel is a web filter that makes the web less of a black box and significantly improves how users consume the web.

• UJAM: UJAM is a cloud-based platform that allows users to create new music or enhance their existing musical talent and share it with friends.

• VideoGenie: VideoGenie allows companies to customer-source video testimonials.

• WeReward: WeReward is a mobile incentive platform that rewards consumers for check-ins or performing tasks.

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*I’ve been working one-handed to rest my wrist. More on that next week.

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-Image: Soluto.

• Where Social Media Monitoring Services Fail – Jason Falls

• What Good are Your Social Media Metrics? – Catchfire Media

• 10 Social Media Monitoring / Analytics tools for Measuring Social Media – Technospire

• Social media monitoring review 2010 – Test 1 results – Fresh Networks

• Social Media Measurement in the Real World – ClickZ News

• Social media measurement: the experts at work – PRWeek

• Implementing social media: brand monitoring – Alex de Carvalho

• 10 Social Media Monitoring / Analytics tools for Measuring Social Media – Mani Karthik

• How will we measure it? Social media vs. advertising – Katie Safrey

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Photo by: striatic

The ImpactWatch team would like to welcome Rahul Dubey as our new Vice President of Business Development.

Rahul joins ImpactWatch after working in Brussels and Malta on a 6 month project for an international media company.  He has been in the media monitoring and measurement world since 2007 and has worked with Global 2000 companies, NGOs, Non-Profits, Members of Congress and Government Agencies to develop their monitoring and measurement capabilities.  He worked with C-level executives to implement industry best practices and strategic research.  Rahul’s experience also includes advertising where he spent 5 years at Fox and CBS Television.

Rahul has a BBA in International Business and BA in Political Science from the University of Michigan.  He has lived in DC for over 7 years, but his heart still bleeds for his hometown Detroit sports teams (yes, Lions included.)  Rahul enjoys cooking, playing tennis, books with lots of pictures, and traveling.