So who’s making the money in social media measurement and monitoring? I was on a panel asked this question at the Measurement & Monitoring Meetup on Friday. It’s essentially another take on the ROI of social media monitoring question, but with the focus widened to include suppliers and consultants, and at first sight it’s a rather annoying question. Having established at the Chinwag event on Tuesday that social media isn’t (necessarily) all about financial ROI, to be asked where the money is in relation to social media monitoring tools seems regressive.
Following a tip-off from webmetricsguru (Marshall Sponder), I’ve been trying out Tweepsearch as a method of finding influencers in various vertical industry niches. He suggested that Tweepsearch’s results, combined with an Excel spreadsheet, is the most effective free method of quickly identifying the movers and shakers in a specific industry or for a chosen topic. And you know, I think he’s right.
Over 200 delegates from around the world attended our conference Monitoring Social Media 09 yesterday in London, including more than 100 PR and marketing execs, 40 leading brands and 15 social media monitoring companies. We managed to squeeze 12 presentations and 3 panel sessions into the day without everyone losing the plot – and, with a little help from the energetic Giles Palmer (and his extravagant tache – see the flickr photos) energy abounded throughout the day.
The case for buzz monitoring and reputation management has been demonstrated repeatedly in recent years. A study from the London School of Economics last year revealed that a 2% reduction in negative word of mouth boosts sales growth by 1% and Dell has attributed a monetary value to this: their average customer is worth $210; their average online detractor costs them $57 and their average online promoter earns them $32.
I’ve been following an interesting debate over on No Man’s Blog about whether social media monitoring services are all their cracked up to be. In the original post Asi Sharabi launches a visceral assault on social media monitoring services, citing Radian6, BuzzMetrics, BrandWatch and Techrigy, among his targets.