In marketing circles, “social media listening” or “social media monitoring” refers to the practice of collecting and analyzing comments made in various social media outlets (such as facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc.) that are relevant to a company or a product. There can be a great deal of value in those comments, since they enable us to learn how people discuss a topic among themselves in a natural and unprompted manner. This type of analysis also enables us to see the rise and fall of “buzz” around a certain topic. Dell, for example, has allocated significant resources to the practice; a few days ago, it opened its “Social Media Listening Command Center,” which will track 22,000 daily topic posts related to Dell.
That’s impressive, but also highlights one of the challenges of social media listening: handling the great volume of data. Several providers have developed software that attempts to automate the process of analyzing the data. Dell is using a popular tool provided by Radian6. These tools are very helpful, but it’s important to understand their limitations. For example, one of the functions provided by the software is measuring the volume of positive versus negative comments. But how would the software classify the following comment? “I hate when people say they don’t like Dell computers.” Most likely the comment would be classified as a negative, because of the phrases “hate” and “don’t like.”
This is not to say these tools don’t have value. But it’s important to remember that social media listening provides qualitative data on a quantitative scale. So the quantitative analysis provided by the software should be done in conjunction with a real live person reading a good sampling of the comments. It’s also important to remember that the people posting comments online may not be a representative sample of your target market. They tend to skew young. And they tend to be people who are particularly happy or particularly unhappy with your product, who have strong enough opinions to take the time to post their comments on the topic. While those opinions can be valuable, we need to keep in mind that they usually represent the ends of the continuum rather than the middle.
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Sources: “Social Media: A Game Changer for the Qualitative Industry?” Kathy Doyle, presented at QRCA Annual Conference, 2010; “Dell To Launch Social Media Listening Command Center,” Mashable, December 8, 2010; “Is Social Media Monitoring the Next BIG THING in Research?” SmartPoint Research Blog, December 13, 2010