The conversation is broken = tools are flawed = influence is elusive
by asi
Once upon a time tracking a conversation was easy. All we had was blog posts, comments, trackbacks, technorati rank. How simple was life back in those days, ha? But the conversation today is sparse, discontinuous and is spilled over different platforms and environments. You write something on your blog, you share it via facebook, it spreads through twitter, I access it through friendsfeed, or through my del.icio.us network, comments can be left anywhere.
Complex? yes. A problem? well, for the people conversing probably not but for brands and agencies wishing to ‘monitor the conversation’ the unthreaded nature of the conversation poses some problems. Just when brands finally realise they have to listen, the tools that available today are simply flawed. That doesn’t mean to say they shouldn’t use them – they still provide extremely valuable data.
I’ve been looking at some of the big and small names in the social media monitoring sphere and while some of them are fairly sophisticated, I believe they give us a partial picture. For a start, we know big share of the conversation take place on social networks like facebook which, as we all know are inaccessible to these tools. Luckily for the measurement chaps, clients that just started to catch up are still pretty ignorant so they can still easily sell them the illusion of control but not for long. The conversation goes wider than existing tools can measure.
The other, interrelated challenge is the idea of tracking and sourcing influentials. Friends, contacts, followers, networks, context and content – how can you get a real understanding of the elusive nature of influence? As much as I share Herdmeister’s point of view regarding the dynamics of influence, I still think it’s perfectly valid (and still valuable) to identify relevant people who have prominent presence in social environments. What you do with them is a different story.
So the conversation is scattered, the tools are a bit flawed (Technorati is so irrelevant It’s a miracle it’s still alive, socialmeter is a joke) and influence is increasingly elusive. I think it’s mainly a challenge for the geeks and until better conversation trackers will develop the only solution is to connect the dots manually. And let’s not forget that studies show time and again that the biggest share of the conversations regarding brands and products take place offline so your best hope is still to give people really good reasons to talk about you...
Hi Asi,
Good discussion you’ve kicked off here. You’re very right that conversations across the web are fractured and splintered, and keeping track of them is a challenge for any business.
I certainly want to emphasize, though, that the idea of *control* is not at all at the heart of social media monitoring. Controlling the conversation is unhealthy if not impossible. At Radian6, what we’re hoping to help businesses do is aggregate the conversations that are happening about their brand, give them the tools to analyze and track those conversations (including metrics like influence and sentiment), and determine what responses and engagement strategies are best for them.
Engaging in discussions across the social web is going to be an increasingly important part of business communication in the digitally-focused world. But I certainly agree with you that offline conversations are important to foster. It’s the cycle of social communication that matters – online to offline and back again. Smart businesses are looking at the entire social ecosystem and finding and empowering their advocates where they want to be.
We’re always welcoming feedback and insights from the community on this topic, so please feel free to reach out anytime. Thanks for an insightful discussion.
Best,
Amber Naslund
Director of Community | Radian6
@AmberCadabra
Terrific post. Like you am a huge fan of Mr. Earls. Just dont think the solutions or erroneous answers are binary. This or that. No way.
I think that there’s a tiny conceptual error here: that we need to hear the whole of a conversation to make intelligent decisions.
You of all people, Asi, should know that this isn’t true.
We don’t need perfect information. All we need is enough information.
Sure, I agree — keeping an eye on “closed” Amazon reviews and Facebook groups is important (although these are often less closed than you suggest). I agree — a lot of the service vendors out there make slightly inflated claims for the accuracy of their product. And I agree — none of the tools out there gives you a complete picture.
But that shouldn’t stop us using them. It should stop us from relying on technology to answer what is a human resources problem.
It seems the issue of analysis always comes down to the same argument: the information isn’t perfect, so we must perfect it before we use it. On the technology side, the data quality vendors are having a field day, asserting that perfect data (or at least better data than is readily available) is a necessary precondition to analysis.
The truth of the matter, though, is that we will never have perfect information, nor could we afford it if it were possible to get. The real core of the problem is to understand what information you have, what issues might exist with that information, and then make the best decisions we can based upon the available information. This also fits the way I think our minds work – as we gain information, we are better able to understand how to use that information, and what additional information we might need.
In the area of literature and art, this has been posited as the “hermeneutic spiral,” which suggests that a better understanding of the whole allows you to better understand the parts, and the better you understand the parts, the more they will inform your view of the whole. Implicit in this concept is that information, and better yet, knowledge, are evolutionary. This has always been the case (the history of virtually every discipline of arts, knowledge, and yes, even business, have followed this path).
So the goal of the practitioner in this case is to take what we know, apply our experience, knowledge and intuition to it, and evolve our knowledge over time. This does not require perfect information; in the past, it has not necessarily required very good information – a little information in the right hands can go a very long way.
Amber, Charlie, Mat and Kevin
many thanks for your insightful comments. Re-reading the post, i think it sounds a lil bit harsh on the measurement gurus and that wasn’t the point. It’s the off-the-shelf tools like technorati and socialmeter that are increasingly irrelevant.
when I said ‘control’ i meant that because of the social media hype brands finally got nervous and are starting to listen, or at least hire people to help them listen and understand. So it’s really NOT about brands controlling the conversation but measurement pros that provide marketers with data and knowledge and strategic recommendations, which give you a sense of control.
And the point I was trying to make is that today, the unthreaded nature of the conversation poses technological as well as strategic challenges – most of the tools that I’ve seen scan blogs and forums and that might be the right place for some brands and not others. I still think that ‘the conversation’ has progressed and spilled over while the tools remain quite the same – but as i said it’s still extremely valuable.
Kevin – thanks for reminding me the Hermeneutic Spiral, it’s absolutely spot on.
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