Dipping into the world of social media monitoring tools

I started my job as Community & Social Media Manager for Breast Cancer Care in January and for the first few weeks I was inundated by calls from people trying to sell me social media monitoring tools. Now, as I believe you need to understand your own job before you leap into choosing measurement tools (and because we haven't got any budget for them anyway) I suggested they call back in, say, six months' time.

But while I was listening to their sales spiels, I did start to wonder how on earth one might go about assessing whether a tool would actually do what I needed it to do.

So when Freshnetworks held a breakfast seminar about their research into social media monitoring tools, I thought I'd go along. They've published a white paper with their initial findings and will be publishing a full report in due time.

They looked at six tools (Alterian, Biz360, Brandwatch, Sysomos, Nielsen, Radian6 and Scoutlabs), looking at ease of set-up, user-friendliness, accuracy of sentiment analysis, ability to pick up key conversation topics and a few more.

I won't go into the details, as you can read the report yourself, but here's a very brief look at what I learned:

1) Jimmy Choo sells wellies (and monitors social media mentions to improve customer service)

2) Starbucks has been embroiled in a gun control controversy in the US

3) Different monitoring tools will give you different results, in terms of volume (number of conversations), the topics and keywords they pick up, and the sentiment. So if you work from the premise that there is one "reality" that you want the tool to reflect, you may need to use a combination of tools to make sure you're getting a rounded picture of what is happening with your brand in the social media space. Now, given that most (all?) charities won't have the resources to use even one of these tools, using more than one seems even less likely, but it's good to remember that no one tool is giving you the whole picture, and what it tells you isn't gospel.

4) Before you choose any tool (or none) you need to be clear what you're looking for, how important it is to you to find it, and what you'll do with it once you've got it.

Are you using it to monitor the reach of your social media activities? Or for improving the service you provide, either by picking up and resolving problems, or by identifying the key concerns of your audience at a particular point in time? Are you using it to find out about your audience or potential audience or to monitor the effectiveness of your campaigning?

Do you need a pretty graph to show your CEO or marketing person, or a list of "customer service issues" to pass to the people designing your services or looking after your fundraisers? Do you need daily reports, or perhaps a monthly survey to identify key concerns to take up in your campaigning?

5) It's not just me who can't get a straight answer out of monitoring tool suppliers about pricing.

6) I don't need and can't afford tools like this at the moment but I can see a time in the future when it could be something we'd use. For example identifying issues causing most concern to people affected by breast cancer could help us be more responsive in our services and campaigning. But as we are quite close to our audience, and user involvement is embedded at the heart of our organisation, we already have ways of identifying key concerns. In future, perhaps if timeliness becomes a primary concern, these monitoring tools might augment or enhance other forms of user involvement.

7) I can type quite fast on an iPhone.

8) "Word clouds" and "word rivers" make me happy (just a tip if anyone does want to sell - or give - me a tool).