Imagine Your Reality

Last week I attended Social Media Club PDX’s networking event on Social Media Monitoring, where Scout Labs, Iterasi, and Webtrends (with Radian6) presented information on social media monitoring tools and what social media monitoring is. Social Media Monitoring is an emerging field of both free and paid applications that provide monitoring of the social web. It’s very much in the early stages of development, but its clear that social media monitoring is essential for businesses that want to manage their social media presence.

While free tools can offer some businesses with a tight budget some leeway, they don’t necessarily provide the same depth of analysis and monitoring that the tools discussed at this meeting could give. For example, Positive Press developed by Iterasi allows people to capture and archive articles and other data, with the ability to also tag the information so that it can be referenced at any time. Scout Labs allows you to determine the level of positive, neutral, and negative mentions, and Webtrends, in collaboration with Radian6 is able to show the conversion of rate of actual traffic that goes to a website vs the number of mentions that have a link to the website. All of these are powerful tools and they will continue to get better and better as time goes on.

Paid social media monitoring is driven mostly toward enterprise level businesses. Certainly those businesses need social media monitoring tools to stay on top of what is being said about their businesses, but small businesses also need such tools. Each of the above mentioned companies provides packages with different levels of monitoring available for businesses. This is useful for small businesses that don’t have the budget an enterprise business has, but also likely doesn’t need to monitor as much as that larger company will.

It will be interesting to see where social media monitoring will go, but even where it’s at now, there’s some promising tools being created that will be useful for any business that is serious about monitoring and managing their social media presence.

Justin Kistner, of Webtrends, posted a brilliant article on the operations side of social media, looking at how businesses invest in and support utilizing social media. I left my own comment on small businesses, because his writing was mainly focused on medium or large businesses, which have a marketing budget and can afford to hire a social media person or department to maintain their social media presence. Below is my comment, with some further commentary for small businesses:

Speaking as a person who works with small businesses, who usually only have either themselves or one or two other people to rely upon the total infrastructure of the business, what I usually see is less of an investment of money, and more of an investment of time and exploring automation options with social media while still maintaining a viable presence on social media.

That said your model still applies to those small businesses. They still need to train either themselves or someone else. They still need to have a business process that describes how they will use social media and integrate into the rest of their business, and they also need some infrastructure, though a lot of that can be found in the various methods of automating social media available to them.

Usually the staff for a small business is the business owner or an employee who manages the social media presence part time, while also doing other work related duties. They need to be trained, but also have limited time to use social media, and will  tend to want to use automation options to manage their time on social media sites further.

Small businesses do need to define their business and marketing processes for using social media. Going in without a clear understanding of how social media can benefit the business as well as what social media to use can really hamstring a business that wants to connect with people online. A small business will need to devise a strategy and process for responses, publishing of material, measurement, promotion, and even automation (in terms of what is automated and why). Achieving clarity on the business policies for using social media will enhance how small businesses integrate it into their marketing efforts and business infrastructure, but small businesses also need to factor in the time element more than a company such as Intel (which has a social media department) will.

In developing processes around how social media is used in a small business, the infrastructure, i.e. where the automation occurs, also needs to be considered. What tools and applications will a small business use and how will those tools and applications benefit the small business in terms of connection with clients, but also management of social media resources? What social networking sites will a business want to be on and why? As a small business develops their social media infrastructure, they’ll find it gets easier to integrate it into what they do, but answering questions such as what I wrote above is essential for small businesses to create a plan that effectively uses social media.

My experience with businesses suggests that laying out this process ahead of jumping into the technology is essential for making it succeed for that business…and some form of investment, time or money, or both, is needed to make it work.