Social Media Monitoring: choosing the right tools for the job: Part 3 – Reporting

Posted by Tim Hodder on 19, October 2011 with No Comments

Welcome to the third and final part of this mini-series on monitoring. So far we’ve looked at the different requirements depending on whether you are doing initial research, or using monitoring as part of your ongoing ‘corporate DJ’ role: in this part we’ll look at the issue of reporting.

In fact, in some situations, reporting is the ONLY thing people are interested in from monitoring. This might be because they just want to grab a quick snapshot of how well their competitors are doing, or they may want to see whether a recent campaign or company announcement has made much of an impact in the online world.

One thing is for sure: the majority of the tools we have looked at so far in this series are not designed for reporting, and so won’t be of much help: they are great for viewing the constant stream of comment and conversation, but typically they are not great at being able to take a high level view of what is happening.

It is the paid-for tools, typically at the more expensive end, which really come into their own when it comes to reporting. There are a number of reasons for this:

Firstly, to create the right type of reports, you typically need to be able to combine some high-level analysis with the right type of graph which explains the findings clearly. For this you need a pretty comprehensive and powerful tool – you’ll need to be able to select different graph types for different reasons or different audiences.

Secondly, it must be capable of aggregating the results from across all channels, (as well as viewing each channel separately). This is not as easy to do as it might sound.

But thirdly and most importantly, the extent to which you can configure the search term you use is vital. Why is this? Well, if you are using a monitoring tool for checking what is being said on a daily basis, and possibly passing on comments to others and getting a general view of what is happening (i.e. as a corporate DJ), then if your search term is not as accurate as it could be, then it does not really matter too much – the effect will be that you get a lot of ‘false hits’ – mentions which are not actually of interest to you – which you can deal with by simply ignoring. However, if you are taking a higher level view, then inclusion of these irrelevant hits will skew your data and possibly give very misleading results.

To make this as accurate as possible, you should make sure that the tool you are using has at least all of the following:

All of the standard boolean operators (AND / OR / NOT)
The ability to define precedence with brackets – for example “Volkswagen” AND (“Golf” or “Polo”)
Advanced operators such as WITHIN, which state that 2 or more phrases must occur within a certain distance of each other
The ability to exclude certain websites
The ability to exclude results found in different languages

Without these features, you’ll either be struggling to get your point over to your audience, or you’ll be using misleading data, neither of which sound like a good idea.

I hope this mini-series on choosing the right monitoring tools has been helpful – all comments welcome!

Twitter: @esocialmediauk

Email: Tim.Hodder@esocialmedia.co.uk

If you missed out, then you can follow the rest of my 3 part series below:

Part 1: Research

Part 2: The Corporate DJ