Social analytics platform Venuelabs first alerted us to the existence of a huge brand blind spot in social monitoring in 2011. The software, which focuses on monitoring your online storefronts — Yelp pages, Foursquare pages, Facebook pages, etc. — rather than performing keyword-based social monitoring like most listening platforms, is a slightly different spin on brand listening. Venuelabs’ perspective is to focus on your owned social pages.

We did a fairly deep dive into this conflict when Venuelabs’ first report emerged. Social monitoring firms generally confirmed they can (or do) monitor your storefronts. But for the non-standard’s (Twitter, Facebook, etc.), you — the brand — likely have to go in and manually set those tertiary ones up. In other words, they probably don’t monitor your pages on UrbanSpoon or Yelp automatically for you.

What Venuelabs is trying to do is sell their software by pointing out that keyword-based monitoring misses these branded storefronts. What they assume, however, is that brands aren’t already doing that. Sure, their software makes it easier. But if there’s a brand out there involved in social at all that is ignoring their storefronts — in fact, not manually checking them regularly — well, they kinda get what they deserve, don’t they?

Still, when Venuelabs set up analysis of many top-tier brands as if they were performing keyword-based monitoring, then compared it to its location-specific type, the results were stunning:

So, are you monitoring your online storefronts? Do you even know where all of yours are? (HINT: If you are a restaurant or retail location, you may have Yelp, UrbanSpoon, Google Places or other local-centric service pages you aren’t even aware exist.) If not, you may want to address the issue.

And know that keyword-based monitoring isn’t all you need to do.

In Part 1 on this topic I wrote about why it’s so important that businesses of every size and type get on board with online reputation management.  I also discussed the importance of “listening” to what’s being said about your business online and pointed out a few tools that are available to help you do so.

Yes, starting your reputation management program by “listening” is important, but if you don’t take the time to understand what you’ve found and you don’t take appropriate and timely action, then listening is pretty much a waste of time.

So, in this post, I’m going to discuss the two other critical and inter-related components to an effective reputation management program; understanding and acting on what you’ve discovered.

Who’s Listening & Responding To What’s Being Said?

If you’re a small business – a local retailer, a restauranteur, a bed & breakfast owner, a financial advisor, a medical practitioner, etc. etc. you’re probably extremely busy and may not be all that savvy when it comes to social media tools and best practices. The tendency will be for you to delegate these responsibilities to a young employee who enjoys social media and seems to know what they are doing.

Of course this strategy could work, but it could also be a recipe for disaster.  Using social media for business is totally different than using it for personal enjoyment.  For businesses, being social online should be all about getting, keeping and growing customers; and doing this successfully requires knowledge, experience and skills that often only social media professionals or people who’ve stayed at a Holiday Inn have.

To be successful with reputation management, you’re going to need best practice processes for gathering information, identifying its relevance, understanding the sentiment and most importantly, when, if, and how to respond.

Although your chosen technology tool can help, only people who are very knowledgeable about your business, its brand promise, and social media practices and etiquette will be able to properly interpret what the data all means, answer the tough questions and (most importantly) know what the appropriate action/response is.

Real social media intelligence is the combination of technology and expert insight by knowledgeable people.

Interpreting What You Find

Analyzing and interpreting the comments you find on Facebook, Twitter, Review and Check-in web sites is a skill in itself.  The true meaning and value of what’s being said is not always obvious.

Here are some of the opportunities that might be found with your “listening” tool that can be of value to your business and/or its reputation:

* Generating New Leads – “Hi Sue, I’m heading to Denver this morning, wanna have lunch?”  This could be an opportunity for a Denver restaurant to offer a promo/invite to their establishment. Bottom line: You need to be on the look out for people who are, or might be, interested in your products and services and appropriately engage them.

* Buzz Tracking – You, or your business, get some positive local coverage in a paper, magazine, or on the radio or TV.  Tracking the spread of the social media response your business gets as result, facilitating the “virality” of this content, being able to determine what the full (buzz) life-cycle is, can all help you to take advantage of an excellent marketing opportunity.

* Brand Reputation – Comments about your business and its products and services can help you to get a handle on how it’s currently perceived and how customers rate you versus your competitors.  You may find opportunities to make improvements to your business here. Or, when the comments are positive, your response could help to create more “brand advocates”.

* Fostering Dialogue and Promoting Advocacy – Identifying and engaging key influencers could build positive spin for your business with these people.

* Crisis Management – If there’s a negative conversation swirling around about your business or brand you not only want to know about it, but you want to be able to respond, when appropriate, to prevent and mitigate any further damage to your business’s reputation.

* Customer Support – Uncovering and responding quickly and appropriately to customer service questions and issues is of course of paramount importance.

Engaging with Prospects and Customers

Engagement in social media is different for every business. And getting started can be daunting, especially after you’ve spent a lot of time listening.

There are varying ways to engage using social media depending on the source of and type of information you’ve uncovered.  As I noted above, you can answer a question, share some information, offer to be helpful to someone and show interest in the needs of your prospects and customers.

Remember, engaging successfully requires an understanding of what to do with social media intelligence once you have it, making sure the right people in your business are aware of it and finally, that each item requiring engagement is responded to appropriately and on a timely basis.

As Sebastian Cowie noted in his post, Online Reputation Management – 5 Tips To Protect Your Brand -

To do this successfully, you’ll need to have a plan in place outlining how to react to each type of comment that arises – especially negative comments. Reacting inappropriately can and will have a negative effect on your business and/or brand, so careful planning is essential.

It is usually best to have one person, or a small group of people, take charge of reacting to negative comments.  When you find a negative blog post, comment or review that warrants a response, act quickly, but make sure that you are professional and courteous at all times. Even if you don’t change the mind of the original commenter, other people will see that you are trying to resolve the situation professionally, and this can go in your favor.

It is also a good idea to react to positive mentions. When you find a positive review or simply someone announcing how much they love what you do, a quick ‘thank you’ can go a long way. It shows that you care about your customers and listen to what they are saying, and it can be a great way to improve brand loyalty.

Most importantly, engagement does not usually end with a social media response alone.  Taking meaningful action some times requires “real” change within your organization.

Meaningful customer-focused engagement often includes making changes to the way you’re doing things; changes to your policies and procedures, changes to how your employees interact with prospects and customers and changes to how you collaborate.

Responding To Negative Criticism

There’s always a chance that you may get up one morning go to your listening tool and get an unpleasant surprise… a negative comment.

The first thing you’ll need to determine is IF you should respond.  If you decide that a response is warranted, then you’ll need to figure out how to respond.

If someone is trashing you and their comments seems ridiculous and unreasonable then DO NOT respond.  Nothing good will come of it.  Keep thinking about what Kenny Rogers once sang “You got to know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold, em, know when to walk away and when to run.”  Don’t “gamble” with your online reputation and get into an online fight with an unreasonable person.  These type of people tend to be notoriously stubborn and vocal… so walk away.  Eventually positive comments will push a lone negative one to the side.

As Christopher Null noted in his article, How to clean up your business’s online reputation -

What if you believe that a complainer has the capability to engage in a mature debate instead of a hostile flame war? Can a measured response ever be appropriate?

Reputation.com CEO Michael Fertik thinks that it’s possible.  “Unless the person is truly nasty and it’s clear there’s no room for productive conversation, in most cases you should indicate your desire to resolve the situation as soon as possible. Let them know you’ll contact them–this protects their privacy and enables you to fix the issue without an online audience. Make sure to follow through,” he says.  And remember: If someone is griping about your business or its products, they might have a valid complaint. Consider all complaints seriously and take corrective action when it’s warranted.

So how about some discussion about how you’ve handled your online reputation — Please comment below… but be nice!

We all know that social media data is driving us towards thinking about our business differently.  Whether it is engaging your consumer demographic in new ways: engaging with customers on a Facebook fan page or managing up to the minute attacks on your brand; handling a viral twitter crisis or simply peeking in on those talking about your brand; listening to people talk about what they like on forums or becoming a trusted resource in those communities; your world is now upside down.  To add insult to injury, all of this is starting to become necessary at the speed of social.  To put it bluntly, this means real time baby.  It isn’t enough to simply track your brand week by week now, it is becoming moment by moment.  And you can’t simply look at key attributes at only the highest level, you need to look at the attributes you know as well as ones that you may not even know exist.

How are we going to survive this new business reality?  I have said it many times in my adventures across the social media landscape; we are living in a time where you don’t own your brand anymore.  How are you going to adjust?  You are going to need to think out of the box right now and not later.  So let’s deconstruct that thought a bit.  If I need to watch my brand or business in a multitude of ways moment by moment in social, what am I going to need?

Frankly, you are going to need tools that are both fast and accurate, a process that is collaborative and connected,  and a culture that is ready to trust that you can’t think as long as you used to.  If you can do that, what do you get for it?  If you can market in the moment, you can achieve business proactivity.

Why are tools that are fast and accurate key to achieving real time understanding?

This is very straight forward… if you can find a system that can process the social data at the speed it is created and that data is inaccurate you cannot make accurate decisions from it.  If you have really accurate data that takes a long time to put together you cannot make timely decisions from it.  Conceptually, you need to be able to get very accurate data quickly if you want to be able to understand the moment by moment reaction to a marketing campaign during the superbowl.

Why does your process need to be collaborative and connected?

Whether you are looking at a company vertically (from the executive to the employees executing the business) or horizontally (across business units or functions), having a strong process is imperative for the company to run.  Anyone who has worked in a large company knows that even at the old pace of business, without process you cannot succeed.  Now we live in a world where a social crisis can arise  and catch you off guard at any time on any day.  Today, a company MUST figure out how to create social business processes that are nearly flawless because of the rate that decisions may have to be made.  If you have leadership who short circuits the social crisis management process or silos that don’t communicate across the organization, you are putting yourself at risk of wasting your lead time that is razor thin to begin with.

Why is trust such an important part of your new social media culture?

While culture and trust are soft topics when it comes to business, no one would argue that they are both important and real.  When working in a new business landscape that demands you be ready at any moment, trusting each other to get the job done is imperative.  You can be able to understand the social information moment by moment, you can have a process that governs what to do, but if your leadership or your people constantly second guess how to take action, you are dead in the water.  If your leadership agrees that each social crisis, for example, needs to be triaged in a fast and organized way by a team with the expertise and authority to interpret the situation, then they cannot cry “the sky is falling” every time they read something negative online.  This wastes time, this wastes resources and it can damage your brand beyond repair.

Why do I keep writing about process and culture in addition to tools?  Because I can give you methods to understand moment by moment what is happening from a technology perspective.  What you must provide is the holistic view of where social fits in your organization and the knowledge that good process and a trusting culture gives you the ability to make those insights actionable and the ROI tangible.

I’m sure that we all understand that our business’s (as well as our personal) reputation on the web is critical to our success and ability to prosper. In the prehistoric ’80s and ’90s, businesses and their brands pretty much controlled their own public image on the web by “pushing” out marketing and public relations communications to an interested public. Friends, those days are gone forever!

Today, it is incredibly easy for anyone to post positive or negative comments and reviews about you or your business online; and these posts by people like you and me can not only go viral very quickly, but can, and do, affect people’s behaviors.

To make matters more confusing for consumers, just as more and more of them are relying on internet-based comments and reviews to make buying decisions, new research from Gartner notes that it’s going to be more difficult to trust what you see online. Paid social media interactions are becoming a more established practice and Gartner is predicting that by 2014, some 10%-15% of all social media reviews and other forms of engagement will be fake, paid for by the companies getting endorsed. Of course Gartner isn’t predicting how many companies will unscrupulously post negative reviews and comments about their competitors, but I’m sure it happens.

Are You Monitoring Your Online Reputation?

Less than a decade ago business’s listened to their customers primarily through email and phone communications while occasionally using surveys and focus groups for getting customer feedback. But as social media exploded, Social Media Monitoring technology tools like Radian 6, Attensity, Lithium and many others came on the market to the meet the social media listening, analysis and engagement needs of larger enterprises.

Today it is of paramount importance that businesses of every size, including small, local retailers, restauranteurs, bed & breakfasts, financial advisors, medical practitioners and other professionals and mom & pops get on board with online reputation management.

Quite frankly, I simply can’t believe how many small businesses are burying their heads in the sand when it comes to managing their online reputation; risking their livelihood on the hope that disgruntled ex-employees, competitors, or unreasonable customers will not destroy the reputation that they have, in many cases, taken years to build.

Get Started By “Listening”

There are three inter-related components to an effective reputation management process; listening, analyzing and engaging. This post will focus on listening, while Part 2 will focus on analyzing and engaging.

As a colleague of mine once said, “If you want to be successful in your business and with social media in particular, you’ve got to start by listening.”

You simply must be scouring the web for (at a minimum) the following:

• Who’s saying what about my business (or brand) and how influential are they?
• Is what’s being said about my business good, bad or indifferent?
• What appears to be triggering negative comments or reviews?
• Where are my customers posting things about my business (what Apps and websites)
• How complete and accurate are my listings in the various online directories and review Apps?
• What’s being said about my competitors (how does my business compare or rank against others?)

Successful listening programs will uncover how your customers and others perceive your brand and could help you to identify the extent to which you’re delivering on your promises.

When customer experiences are out of line with customer expectations — either positively or negatively, they become increasingly likely to opine than when expectations are simply met.  So be sure to listen for compliments, complaints, problems and unmet needs. As you implement your listening program, you just may also uncover suggestions for making improvements to your business, products and services.

Listening Technology Tools

My favorite tools for listening to what’s being said on the web (web pages, blogs posts and comments, news, forum conversations, press releases, videos, pictures, etc.) is a combination of Google Alerts and Google Reader.

Set up Google Alerts to search for any mentions of your business, your products and services, your competitors, your industry and any other content that might be of interest to you and your customers. But, instead of getting daily emails from your Alerts, set them up to direct the found content to a Google Reader account you’ve specifically set up to manage your online listening program. Then each day, all you need to do is peruse the content delivered to your Google Reader for items that are in need of further review or action.

But how about all of the other websites and Apps? For example, social media sites like Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and Twitter; online directories like 411.com, DexKnows, MerchantCircle and Superpages; check-in Apps like Foursquare; review and comment sites like Yelp, Trip Advisor; and industry-specific review sites such as Wellness.com and Doctoroogle.com for doctors and dentists, DealerRater and Edmunds.com for car dealers and Houzz where consumers gather to talk about remodeling and other hobbies but liberally sprinkle vendor recommendations.

There’s not enough time in the day to go to all of these sites, (and the hundreds of others), to see if there are any mentions of your business, brand or products. That’s where a good “listening” tool will help. It will make the listening process not only more effective but much more efficient.

Of course if you’re a mid to large enterprise you should consider one of the social media monitoring tools I mentioned earlier. But if you’re a small, local business these products will have way more functionality than you need and will probably be too expensive for you, as well.

Here’s some listening/reputation management tools for small businesses:

• Vendasta
• Trackur
• Local Reputation
• Chatmeter

Closing Comments 

Reputation management has taken hold at many mid to large-sized enterprises whom recognize the need to track what people are saying about their company, brands and products. It’s the small business community that still represents a largely untapped market for reputation management tools.

So why hasn’t reputation management become a de facto part of every small business marketing plan? Many experts, including me, thought it would have happened by now.

Please share your thoughts and ideas in the comments below; and stay-tuned for part 2 of this post which will cover how to analyze what you find and engage the people who have commented about or reviewed your business.

In a move that surprised even the most jaded customer, Charter abruptly pulled the plug on its social media customer service team. But why? A brief statement from the company:

“We believe speaking directly with a customer is a more personal, effective and consistent way to answer questions, solve an issue or provide information, and we will focus our efforts on these means of communications. We’re committed to treating our customers with great care, and we believe that person-to-person interaction accomplishes that in a more meaningful way for more of our customers.”

…and some analysis from SME’s Ike Pigott:

Is this proof that social just can’t scale for customer care? Is the cost too high? Or is there something else happening here? Please share your reactions (and theories) in the comments.

(Especially if you work for Charter, and have some inside scoop. Identities withheld.)

Klout is about to become less of a mystery to everyone. Or at least, how the service determines your influence will. A new release of the influence measurement tool hits this week and I got a sneak peek. Overall, it’s going to be easier for individual users to understand what impacts their scores. Not only does the new Klout have a user dashboard that shows what percentage of your score is impacted by which networks, but what metrics on those networks it’s seeing.

As I’ve said before, Klout is one way of looking at influence. I like the product and think it’s useful, but I would caution anyone from using Klout scores alone to determine anything. Klout, in conjunction with other scores, human analysis, website traffic and even off-line metrics, can be used to develop a very nice influence profile of someone you can use in your marketing and public relations efforts. But Klout scores alone mean very little.

With its new redesign and focus on revealing more about what goes into a person’s score, however, Klout is showing businesses and individuals the way to improving theirs. A high Klout score isn’t a bad thing to have or aspire to. It means you have some measure of online impact in what you share and produce in terms of content on the social web. Understanding you score and what makes it such can only help you build your own, or understand that of others.

The biggest feature add-on with the new release is the Moments. Recent posts you’ve made that have impacted a number of others are shown with a list of what other individuals (and their respective scores) interacted with or were impacted by that piece of content. In a different view, one that shows your interactions, you see a little green dot array of how impactful that particular interaction was in improving your score.

So now you can test and measure to see what impact your content is having and who it is having and impact upon. Very nice.

For companies using Klout, the new changes mean better understanding through improved metrics and indicators of what triggers Klout’s algorithm. For companies not using Klout, it might actually now be time to look into it. At a minimum you’ll be able to easily see who you are impacting and what influential people your content may be reaching. That information can help you optimize and reach more in the future.

Keep in mind there are several critics of  Klout’s privacy policies. Before you jump in as a brand, you should understand that Klout is opt-in, but the service has, in the past, used friends-of-friends input and data to measure and collect scores on individuals without their knowledge or approval. In some minds, that’s a violation of privacy. Frankly, I just think it’s a third-party measure of your public data, so I’ve never gotten upset about it. But that’s just my perspective. Others can explore that topic more deeply if you’re interested.

For me, Klout is a very useful look at online influence, particularly of individuals who spend a lot of time communicating on social networks. The new redesign and feature set are significant improvements on the practicality of using it.

Klout’s new changes should take effect with your account over the next few days. Enjoy and report back — what do you like or dislike about the new Klout.

P.S. – If you’re going to be in southern California in October, Klout CEO Joe Fernandez will be participating in a “fireside chat” with me at Explore Orange County.  You can find out more here: Explore O.C.

For the longest time, if you wanted social media monitoring software, which is now being referred to as “social listening” software at a decible level hovering around obnoxious, but I digress, you had to pay about $500 per month for it. What that meant was social media monitoring wasn’t available to medium or small businesses.

While the market has gotten better with more affordable tools (SocialMention.com and ViralHeat.com even offer free solutions), you still have a large gap in quality and price, in my opinion. You also have a problem in the market in that many of the social media monitoring solutions (Radian6, Lithium Social Media Monitoring, Sysomos and the like) are adding features and gravitating to become much more social media management focused. They seem to have waned from monitoring and listening in an arms race to build the all-in-one platform brands seem to want.

Of course, that’s what happens when big companies acquire you. You are forced to find ways to make a lot more money fast. Losing focus is always going to be a post-acquisition issue.

SM2 recently launched a new social media monitoring (okay, listening) product last week that seems to fill that SMB gap in the monitoring space a bit. This SM2 product is not to be confused with the Alterian SM2 name which is a similar product from the same parent company but focuses on a more enterprise clientele. (Disclosure: SM2 is one of the most recent new advertisers here on Social Media Explorer. We thank them for their support!) Billed as software that brings enterprise class social media listening to small and mid-sized businesses, SM2 has a starting price point of $255 per month.

Depending upon your classification of small business, I’d argue that’s still not very affordable, but it’s a lot better than most of the paid solutions on the market (which start at around $500) and comes with the first 30-days free.

But SM2 seems to have the other issue fixed as well. They’re not trying to be everything to everyone. Clearly labeled as a social media listening platform, SM2 seems to be focused on doing that one thing very well. That’s refreshing in this day and age of social technology.  I’ve told many companies you can’t just add one social media management feature or another, you’ve got to add them all or you’re less attractive than everyone else who seems to be building feature sets like ants build hills. SM2 seems content to just do monitoring and do it well. That will be attractive to some customers.

Then there’s the fact parent company SDL is already publicly traded and has profitable business lines through other software products. They’re not smashing things together and going for the enterprise dollar here. They’re filling a gap in the social media monitoring market.

And sometimes, filling a gap is enough to vault a company from a role player to a star.

I’ve not yet used SM2 but have looked at a demo of the product and know it well enough to say it has to be worth trying if you’re looking for a listening platform. Heck, for 30 days you can do that for nothing, so it can’t hurt.

Jump over and check them out. You can click on the ad over on the sidebar or check out SM2 on their website.

If you’re already using SM2, tell us about your experiences in the comments. If you’re not using them, is $255 per month a reasonable cost for a good listening platform? The comments are yours.

Marketing mad scientists have predicted that social data will reach its potential as a business resource for years. But CMOs have been hesitant to trust that social data could help fuel business transformation at all levels.

For the impact of social media to evolve into social business, three things will need to happen. Decision makers will need to trust and absorb social data. They’ll need to act on the implications of social data. And social data will need to escape the marketing silo. A new report from The CMO Club and Bazaarvoice indicates that these three things may be happening to a much greater extent than some people think.

It seems social data has finally escaped the laboratory, and put the rubber to the road, with CMOs firmly behind the wheel. For those obsessed with demonstrating the ROI of social media, according to these early reports, over three quarters of them believe social efforts are driving sales. That’s a pretty impressive warm-up lap.

Chief Customer Advocate: How Social Data Elevates CMOs surveyed Chief Marketing Officers to find out the extent to which they trust and are using social data. Among CMOs, social data is now considered a trustworthy source of real-time consumer insight.  Even more encouraging, social data is crossing the bounds of marketing and brand management, providing consumer intelligence that can be put to work across the organization.

One of the most encouraging items in the study for me is the level of buy-in that CMOs are claiming in social data. Only a few short years ago, it was a struggle to convince brand managers that the potential business value of social data met or exceeded  that of social content. While many were instantly sold on the idea of “free advertising” that social content represented, years of relying on traditional consumer surveys and measurement methodology seemed to make CMOs a little gun-shy when it came to the validity of social data.

CMOs Trust Social Data… Maybe Too Much?

That period of reticence seems to be over. According to the survey, social data impacts decisions for 89% of CMOs. Any CMOs still ignoring social data as a rich vein of business intelligence are officially behind the bell curve. Specifically, CMOs believe that social data is at least somewhat effective in indicating:

• Consumer sentiment toward products (80%) and companies or brands (72.8%)
• Influence of individuals or groups on purchase decisions (78%)
• Trends that will impact business (83%),

To that last point, I’m most excited to see that rather than using social data reactively, CMOs are increasingly applying social insights with an eye to the future. Almost half (47%) have used social data in forecasting.

I do find it a little concerning that so many CMOs have a level of confidence I don’t share in influence measurement tools like Klout. The C-suite is making decisions based on a belief that social data can estimate influencers’ ability to drive purchases. I worry a bit that in this particular case, the data may not live up to expectations.

Social Data Escapes the Marketing Silo

On a more encouraging note, social data is filtering across the entire enterprise. CMOs report that sales (36%), product development (35%), and customer service (25%) teams are accessing social data. That’s fantastic news, because it signals increased consumer focus in the areas of business best poised to reap rewards from it. Businesses may begin anticipating consumer desires, as much as reacting to them. I’d love to hear more stories of product innovation and improved customer retention rates inspired by social data.

I’m a little discouraged when it comes to executive management, since less than 10% of the responses indicated the executive suite was checking out social data.  One would hope that the departments most removed from the consumer (IT, the executive management team) would take greater advantage of having this clearer view of the consumer. Unfortunately, the data is being utilized heavily by those areas of business already closest to the consumer, and rarely by those who could probably use the additional insight. Bummer.

That relative disinterest is apparently not for lack of trying on the part of CMOs. According to the study, 97% of them share insights from social data with other C-level executives at least annually, 67% monthly, and 25% at least weekly. When CMOs can show performance gains in key business metrics like sales, loyalty and awareness tied to social data, hopefully even the cynics in the  C-suite will sit up and take notice.

For years, social media professionals have complained that CMOs were sitting on an embarrassment of untapped riches in social data. Now that they recognize it’s a valuable resource, our job is to help them extract the most valuable consumer insights to fuel their business.

Related articles

• Want To Know What Social Media Users Are Thinking? Now You Can! (socialmediaexplorer.com)
• Why Big Data Will Deliver ROI For Social Business (informationweek.com)
• Social Data. The New Driver for Marketing Strategy. | Lanoba Blog on Social Login, Sharing and Analytics (huguesrey.wordpress.com)

The SoLoMo Show is a weekly podcast hosted by Adam Helweh and Cory OBrien. Each week they discuss topics, trends and tactics related to social, local and mobile marketing. Every weekend we will publish the latest episode, related show notes and links to all of the topics discussed on the show here on Social Media Explorer.

Adam and Cory are joined by Erin Robbins O’Brien, the Director of Marketing and Communications at Viralheat, as they discuss social media tools, and how to make the most of them when you want to monitor, listen to, measure and engage with social media marketing. Topics include how to use social media tools before, during, and after a campaign, what you need to consider when setting up keywords to make sure your social media tool is performing to the best of its ability, where metrics fail and what you should be measuring, how to actually measure and improve ROI, sentiment analysis and the role sentiment should play in your marketing measurements, paid vs free tools and when you should consider upgrading to a paid service, and the future of social media monitoring. They also discuss Viralheat’s announcement of the industry’s most comprehensive free service for social media management, publishing and engagement, and why it could save you thousands of dollars per month. In addition, Adam and Cory share an infographic that examines the current state of social media monitoring tools, who’s using them, and how happy they are with the current tools that are available.

Show Notes:

• Viralheat
• Erin Robbins O’Brien
• Viralheat Launches Industry’s Most Comprehensive Free Service for Social Media Management, Publishing and Engagement
• Infographic: Social Media Monitoring Tools
• The Future of Sentiment Analysis – Interview with Seth Grimes

SoLoMo Show Links:

• SoLoMoShow.com
• Subscribe: iTunes, Email or YouTube
• Twitter: @SoLoMoShow, @CoryOBrien and @SecretSushi
• Email: SoLoMoShow@gmail.com

Related articles

• SoLoMo Show Ep 25: A Look at Twitter For Marketers… Present & Future(socialmediaexplorer.com)

  ---

• SoLoMo Show EP 23: Social-Loco Interviews Including Groupon’s Head of Mobile Marketing & 17 Year Old Hackathon Winner(socialmediaexplorer.com)

  ---

• SoLoMo Show Ep 27: Google+ Updates, Twitter Expands Mobile & How to Make Amazing Infographics(socialmediaexplorer.com)

  ---

Sentiment analysis plays a key role in social intelligence (a generalization of social-media analytics) and in customer-experience programs, but the disparity in tool performance is wide. It’s natural that users will look for accuracy figures, and that solution providers — the ones that pretend to better performance — will use accuracy as a differentiator. The competition is suspect, for reasons I outlined in Social Media Sentiment: Competing on Accuracy. Per that article, there’s no standard yardstick for sentiment-analysis accuracy measurement. But that’s a technical point. Worth further exploring:

• Providers, using human raters as a yardstick, don’t play by the same rules.
• It’s fallacious that humans are the ultimate accuracy arbiters anyway. Can a machine in no way judge better (as opposed to faster or more exhaustively) than a person?
• This focus on accuracy distracts users from the real goal, not 95% analysis accuracy but rather support for the most effective possible business decision making.

To explore –

Human benchmarks

We benchmark machine performance, on purely quantitative tasks, against natural measures: Luminosity according to a model of the sensitivity of the human eye (candela), and mechanical-engine output against the power of draft horses (horsepower). But just as a spectrometer measures light of wavelengths unseeable by humans and quantifies visible-wavelength measurements in a way humans never could, and a Saturn V rocket will (or could) take you places an animal could never go unassisted, I believe that sentiment and other human-language analysis technologies, when carefully applied, can deliver super-human accuracy. I believe it is no longer true that “The right goal is for the technology to be as good as people,” as Philip Resnik, a Univ of Maryland linguistics professor and lead scientist at social-media agency Converseon, puts it.

As Professors Claire Cardie and John Wilkerson explain, “The gold standard of text annotation research is usually work performed by human coders… In other words, the assessment is not whether the system accurately classifies events, but the extent to which the system agrees with humans where those classifications are concerned.”

“Agrees with humans”

Note the statement, “the assessment is not whether the system accurately classifies events, but the extent to which the system agrees with humans where those classifications are concerned.”

And consider a company, Metavana, that competes on accuracy, with claims of 95-96% performance on combined topic extraction and sentiment analysis. Metavana President Michael Tupanjanin says the company measures accuracy “the old fashioned way.” According to Tupanjanin, “We literally will take — we recently did about 3,000 quotes that we actually rated, and we sat down with a bunch of high school kids and actually had them go through sentence by sentence by sentence and see, how would you score this sentence?” I praise Metavana’s openness, but this approach is backwards, as we shall see. It assesses whether humans agree with the machine, not whether the machine agrees with humans, per established methods.

According to Erick Watson, the company’s director of product management, the software identifies entities and topics and then further mines sources for sentiment expressions. In the automotive sector, says Watson, the engine identifies expressions “such as ‘fuel efficient’ or ‘poor service quality’ and automatically determines which of these sentiment expressions is associated with [a] brand.” Sounds reasonable, but then Watson wrote me, “Expressions that contain no sentiment-bearing keywords are classified as neutral (e.g. ‘I purchased a Honda yesterday.’)”

I ran a Twitter poll on Watson’s ‘I purchased a Honda yesterday.’ With 22 respondents, 45% rated it neutral and 55% rated it positive. Humans may see sentiment in an expression that contains no sentiment-bearing keywords! Metavana’s summary dismissal of such expressions, coupled to an accuracy-measurement method that restricts evaluation to machine-tagged expressions (the ones the company doesn’t dismiss), inflates the company’s accuracy results.

There’s more to the accuracy appraisal.

Beyond humans

I believe that sentiment and other human-language analysis technologies, when carefully applied, can deliver super-human accuracy. True, we’re years from autonomous agents that can navigate world of sensory (data) inputs and uncertain information in order to flexibly carry out arbitrary tasks, which is what humans do. But arguably, we can design a system that can, or soon will be able to, conduct any given task — whether driving a car or competing at Jeopardy — better than a human ever could.

A first attempt at automating a process typically involves mimicking human methods, but an intelligent system may reason in ways humans don’t. In analyzing language, in particular, machines look for nuance that may emerge only when statistical analyses are applied to very large data sets. That’s the Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data when, per Google’s Peter Norvig, “the hopeless suddenly becomes effective, and computer models sometimes meet or exceed human performance.” That’s not to say that machines won’t fail, badly, in certain circumstances. It is to say that overall, in the (large) aggregate, computers can and will outperform humans both on routine tasks and by making connections — finding patterns and discovering information — that a human never would.

Think of this insight as an extension of the Mythical Man-Month corollary, that “Nine women can’t make a baby in one month.” A machine can’t make a baby at all, but one can accelerate protons to near light speed to create sufficient mass for collisions to result in the generation of unseeable, but inferable, particles, namely Higgs bosons. Machines can already throw together (fuse) text-extracted and otherwise-collected information to establish links and associations that a human (or nine hundred) would never perceive.

Philip Resnik’s attitude, the established attitude, that “the right goal is for the technology to be as good as people,” is only a starting point. We seek to create machines that are better than humans, and we should measure their performance accordingly.

The accuracy distraction

My final (but central) point is this: The accuracy quest-for-the-best is a distraction.

Social intelligence providers often claim accuracy that beats the competitions’. (Lexalytics and OpenAmplify should be pleased that they’re the benchmarks new entrant Group of Men chose to compare itself to.) Providers boast of filtering the firehouse. They claim to enable customers to transform into social enterprises, as if presenting or plugging into a widget-filled social-analytics dashboard, with simplistic +/- sentiment ratings, were the key to better business operations and decision making. Plainly stated –

The market seeks ability to improve business processes, to facilitate business tasks. Accuracy should be good enough to matter, but more important, analytical outputs should be useful and usable, aligned to business goals (positive/negative sentiment ratings often aren’t) and consumable within line-of-business applications.

I’m interested in how your technology and solutions made money for your customers, or helped them operate more efficiently and effectively, or, for that matter, saved lives or improved government services. The number that counts is demonstrated ROI.

Disclosure: Earlier this year, Converseon engaged me for a small amount of paid consulting and was a paying sponsor of my November 2011 Sentiment Analysis Symposium.

And a plug: Check out the up-coming Sentiment Analysis Symposium, slated for October 30, 2012 in San Francisco, preceded by a half-day Practical Sentiment Analysis tutorial, to be taught by Diana Maynard of of the Univ of Sheffield, UK.

When Twitter first baked the new retweet style into their web platform there was no way for HootSuite users to see who retweeted them. Subsequently, HootSuite introduced the “My Tweets, Retweeted” stream to address this. However, this function still doesn’t allow for an easy way to see and respond to the actual person who retweets your content.

One hack to find the source of a web RT on Twitter involves clicking the date stamp of a message in HootSuite:

This redirects you to the individual tweet on Twitter.com where you can see which users retweeted your content:

The problem with this solution is that it doesn’t present an easy way to respond to the RT. You have to root around Twitter to find the post – as a user that monitors and manages a number of active streams I find this to be seriously unproductive.

An Easier Way

While experimenting with the “My Tweets, Retweeted” stream I discovered a workaround that lets you see and respond to native Twitter web RT without having to leave the HootSuite dashboard. I hope you find it helpful.

Step 1: Add the “My Tweets, Retweeted” stream to HootSuite.

Step 2: Click your icon image.

Step 3: Click the “Mentions” tab within the profile pop up screen.

Step 4: Identify missing retweets.

Step 5: Reply to RT (if applicable).

If you are using HootSuite, this is one method of monitoring that will help mitigate the chances of missing native Twitter retweets.

Another best practice to consider is using multiple tools for monitoring, including TweetDeck, which offers the ability to track native Twitter retweets. If you have any other suggestion on how to work around this functionality gap in Hootsuite please let me know. The comments are yours.

Update: There is another (easier) solution that presented itself during the comment discussion that evolved around this issue. To see all your retweets simply set up a search stream in HootSuite using your Twitter username (“@username”) as the search term. Also, for more information about why you can’t see Twitter web retweets in your HootSuite mention stream check out this post: http://help.hootsuite.com/entries/434415-why-can-t-i-see-twitter-web-retweets-in-my-mentions-stream

Have You Registered For Explore Minneapolis?

Don’t miss two days of intensive learning with some of the leading thinkers and practitioners in the digital marketing and social media marketing space. Join SME’s Jason Falls and Nichole Kelly, The Now Revolution co-author Jay Baer, Edison Research’s Tom Webster, Ad Contrarian Bob Hoffman, Neil Patel of Kissmetrics and more at one of the leading digital and social media marketing events of 2012, August 16-17 in Minneapolis, Minn. DON’T WAIT TO REGISTER! Seats are filling fast! Reserve yours today!