Social Media Monitoring and Analysis: Call It What You Will

“The beginning of wisdom is the definition of terms,” wrote Socrates. It’s an aphorism that scarce few marketing solutions providers take to heart, as evidenced by the ongoing proliferation of three-letter acronyms and brand-specific labels used to describe already-existing business processes, product capabilities and competitive arenas.

Consider the diversity of terms widely espoused over the past couple of years to describe a set of technology solutions now offered by upwards of 40 marketing vendors and deployed by a rapidly-growing number of major companies within the realm of consumer-generated content. These terms include brand monitoring, buzz monitoring, social media monitoring, market influence analytics, and online consumer intelligence.

“We don’t consider ourselves brand monitors,” a product manager at one leading vendor told me. “We consider ourselves online anthropologists.” So there’s another term to add to the mix!

Truth is, all these terms describe the need for companies to keep a proverbial ear to ground and “listen in” on what online consumers are saying about them in blogs, online discussion forums and other social media, with the goal of generating actionable insights. In many cases, different vendors take very similar approaches to generating these insights, deploying technologies with nearly-identical features and functionalities. (“The green bar means positive consumer sentiment.”)

Okay, granted, some key differentiators do exist in terms of the scope of media under surveillance, how the insights are delivered (e.g., a strategic presentation versus a digital dashboard), and to what extent the client can actively influence the online dialog using specialized authoring tools.

Still, wouldn’t it be nice if we could come to some universal agreement on terminology? It would certainly make my life easier.

That’s because I’m currently conducting research to identify how best-in-class companies are monitoring and analyzing consumer-generated content in support of their brand marketing efforts. I also want to understand the impact in terms of their market research, brand reputation protection, competitive intelligence and new product development activities. In addition, I’m curious to learn about whom in the organization is responsible for—and benefits most from—the consumer insights that are gleaned, and what metrics companies use to measure success.

Co-sponsored by the Word of Mouth Marketing Association, this Aberdeen Group report will be published in January. (Note: I’m pleased to be able to offer a complimentary copy, when published, to all readers who take the short survey www.aberdeen.com/survey/social_media.)

For the purpose of this report, I’ve decided to go with the term “social media monitoring and analysis.” Frankly, “buzz monitoring” sounds a bit too colloquial to my taste. Can a senior marketing or PR professional make the case before the CMO or CFO to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in a solution that monitors something called buzz?

I also ruled out the term “brand monitoring,” because, in my view, it tells only part of the story. Jim Nail, a former research analyst at Forrester Research who helped coin the term, tends to agree.

“Brand monitoring is too narrow a term and really only describes one way of looking at the data in social media,” says Nail, who is now chief strategy and marketing officer at TNS Media Intelligence/Cymfony. He prefers the term “market influence analytics.” This speaks more broadly about why you want to monitor this content and how you will apply it to your business to understand the degree of influence your marketing, PR and communications efforts are having on the market and also the flow of influence across the various forms of social media and traditional media content,” he says.

Personally, I believe all these terms are nothing more than a verbal crutch, in much the same way that the term “horseless carriage” was a verbal crutch before the concept of the automobile took root in the American psyche. This realization prompted me to call two major automobile companies to get their takes on social media monitoring and analysis solutions.

“We monitor social media because it provides unsolicited and unbiased consumer opinions about our products and brands in real time,” says Christine Stasiw Lazarchuk, director of global market research at Ford Motor Company. “If a brand, messaging or product problem is identified by bloggers, we can fix the problem quickly before it gets too widespread. Also, positive comments help us understand early on if something is working particularly well.”

Ed Garsten, manager of electronic media communications at Chrysler, echoes her perspective. He says he monitors and analyzes social media “to track how the company is being portrayed. It’s a barometer we use to determine the viral spread of our messages and if our tactics are working,” he says. ” We can tie dips from positive to negative consumer sentiment to news events, and the tonality of content in blogs and social networks tells us how well we’re getting our key messages across.”

No doubt, the vendors that provide social media monitoring and analysis solutions are meeting a real market need. I only wish they could all agree on what to call it.

Jeff Zabin is a research fellow at the Aberdeen Group, where he covers customer management technology, and is the author of “Precision Marketing.” He can be reached at [email protected].