The nice thing about setting up alerts in a monitoring platform like Alterian/SM2 is that I catch mentions that I might otherwise miss, like a post on the new BuzzDetector blog  GianAndrea Facchini on Social Media Analytics.

Want to make two points here.

1. Monitoring Platforms can be a much better place to set up alerts than Google (Alerts); I was trying to convince Gary Vaynerchuk about just that, last year when we were at a meeting where he spoke.  Gary reminds of Chief Engineer Scott, or Scotty, from the original Star Trek series, who didn’t like the new, “quiet”, Enterprise (Next Gen), and preferred, instead, the original engines that “rumbled” (though I can’t seem to find the exact phrase – I think it came from here.   It was also at that meeting Gary said “You can take the best bottle of water from a “unicorn’s ass” and it still won’t sell if the marketing isn’t right”. Getting back to my point – monitoring platforms can add quite a bit of value and simplify life for people like Gary Vee (though he seems to distrust them, his success comes from his “gut” and systems don’t seem to fit – he’d rather search manually and answer every tweet as he finds it ).  What’s worse yet, people who think that I represent the opposite side – Spock, when in fact, I’m more like Scotty.

2. Analytics Consultancy  can be, and often is, a better route to go than doing Analytics yourself, especially with self serve systems, given the current evolution of the field of Social Media Analytics.  Wait a couple of months, read the book, and it will be more clear (what I’m saying here) but in the meantime – here’s a link to a post by Gian Andrea that i picked up by Alterian/SM2 alerts.

Gian’s Italian and English isn’t his first language, I did look over the post briefly before it was published (below).

The role of consultancy in the process of social media monitoring

The first post of the revised Buzzdetector blog is dedicated to Marshall Sponder,webmetricsguru.com blog.

I met him in London, in November 2010, for the Social Media Monitoring Conference, and had an interesting dinner with him, and a friend, with a lot of chat about Social Media Monitoring and art.

Ok, I’m not here to write about the dinner, indeed, and the great conversation we had, but about his book, expected to hit the shelves on August 19th in the US, and on September 30th in Europe (however copies can be ordered directly through MHProfessional after July 20th) .

I had the pleasure to participate with this book by adding a case study to it, and also, to read it in advance: it is a must read for any practitioner of Social Media, both in agencies and in organizations.

Marshall is tackling two main key facts arising from the wide offer of tools to monitor Social Media.

The first key fact is about choosing the right tool or platform.

To quote Marshall:

“Does it make sense to hire 10 people to change a lightbulb, 9 to move the ladder and one to screw in the bulb? With the right choices, you just need one or two people, in most cases”

Ask yourself in advance why and what you want to listen for on the web: the answer will drive you in the process of choosing the most appropriate tool.

By the way, there are several reasons to monitor the web, for CRM purposes, for Reputation, for Business Intelligence, just to name some of the most important: pick yours.

The second key fact is the crucial role of the data analysts.

Clumps of data usually make no sense at all, if there’s no one on staff able to read them and translate them into actionable insights.

Consultancy services for organizations and agencies is a key differentiator between self serve and more boutique platforms: the ability to get the best results out of a platform comes from instituting setting up key KPI’s, creating custom crawling of selected online sources known to be relevant for the customer and subject, and weeding through the enormous amount of information on the web; this is a crucial business function and a must have.

My personal takes on the above can be summarized as follows:

• Be strategic in the definition of why listening for the web: it has to be part of a strategic process involving marketing and communication.

• Don’t focus on the special effects, but instead, on the data that each tool is able to deliver: don’t settle on an amazing set of graphs with little substance; it’s always to sell flashy stuff, but when it comes to business decision, good data is much more pertinent.

• Ask yourself if you have the staff to take on the tasks: listening for mentions on the web is a hard job, requires time and passion and the workload of an extensive monitoring activity can be easily underestimated if you think that an automated platform will do the job on your behalf. Also, if you choose the wrong platform to work with for the task at hand, you may end up with a project that becomes too expensive and time consuming to execute well.

• Be ready to focus on content, not numbers: a common mistake is to overlook the manual culling and category classification needed to make unstructured online data useful. But, be prepared to be surprised, when someone unknown comes up with a fresh view of your business, that you were not aware of, yet.

And then again, here’s something from Scotty that illustrates a familiar bind and how to handle it.