Social-Media Listening vs. Social-Media Monitoring: Truly Connecting, or Merely Collecting?
Most companies know they need to pay attention to social media, because it provides the richest data sets of consumer information that have ever existed. So brands know there's an opportunity, and they fear being left out if they aren't tapped in.
But what's the difference between monitoring social media and listening to social media?
Many times those terms are confused or used interchangeably. Scores of solution providers and technologies have sprung up, all promising to help companies understand what people are saying about their brands online.
What do you really need to know? We'll explore the differences between monitoring and listening analytics, with emphasis on the value of true listening.
In short: Monitoring sees trees; listening sees the forest.
To borrow an analogy from public health, imagine that a mysterious illness has struck your city. The equivalent of a monitoring solution is to find as many sick people as you can and treat them. You could "monitor," going door to door, checking each person for signs of sickness and then treating each one. You would have an effect, but it would take many doctors and nurses—and a lot of time. And if you don't get at the root cause, another outbreak could occur across town.
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Hi Dan. Great article. There are so many people rushing into the "Analysis" space who fail to get this point. I talk often to my clients about "data" vs "intelligence" and how one will tell you what happened and the other tells you what to do about it. I will reference this article to further illustrate that point.
Dan,
You make some excellent points. Right now, monitoring is all the rage because it's new and easy for companies to grasp and understand. As the market evolves, there will be more attention on listening because it will give companies a better and more informed idea about what specifically is happening and, as important, what they should be doing as a result.
cheers, Mark
Mark Evans
Director of Communications
Sysomos Inc.
Great point about leveraging the power of social media tools to detect trends. I have a short online demonstration I did using Radian 6 to show how to look for conversation trends using the conversation cloud widget to develop content strategies widget at my blog.
http://socialmediaroadtrip.com/social-media-workshop/content-strategy
This is a great article about the importance of actually incorporating the information you learn by monitoring your social media channels. One way to incorporate things like this into promotions you create (which was mentioned in the article) is to use a tool like a platform to quickly create dynamic, engaging promotions of all types (like sweeps, video/photo/essay contests, etc). One great tool is Wildfire-- one of Facebooks 12 verified consultants, using Wildfire to create your promotion, which could then run in Facebook, or Twitter, and microsites, ensures that your campaign is working within the (sometimes strcict) guidelines of Facebook...whats cool too is that you don't need to be technically savvy at all to create one, there's just a 6 step wizard you go through to create your promo. Check it out at http://www.wildfireapp.com
Great article, Dan. I'm writing an article write now about sentiment analysis, actually, that I think ties in nicely with what you wrote here. It's not about "thumbs up", "thumbs down", but the insights that a monitoring service can really offer to the client. We rarely furnish "just" dashboards to our clients because it is the studies and reports that really add value to the data that we find, and allow us to withdraw usable insights that reflect their images online and what it was they were trying to monitor.
Nice finding you here
Best,
Michelle @Synthesio
Web monitoring and research