Social Monitoring. Sorry, we do only speak English.

Juli 26th, 2010 • View Comments Social, Tools
Tags: Analytics, Business, Monitoring, Radian 6, Semantic, Social Influence Marketing, Tools, Truth, World

The other week I attended a presentation by a major social analytics vendor from the U.S. If you have ever attended a telephone presentation of one of the many social-related tools you know how shiny and well applicable these tools seem to be when they get presented to you.

During the presentation the sales representative highlighted how easy and simple it is for his tool to identify and validate social leads according to the brand’s needs. I asked how the tool does it. He pointed at the tool’s sophisticated semantical algorithms. I answered ‘Fine, so it’s only applicable in the U.S., right?’ I am German, working in a Canadian agency in the Netherlands. This tool does only speak English. It is neither prepared to cluster German, Dutch, Italian, Polish nor French conversations. He replied ‘Well, that’s the problem with any analytics tool’.

I think that’s kind of funny. Among the hundreds of social media monitoring solutions there is almost none which is polylingual. Rather simple solutions such as Viralheat or Radian 6 are able to add transparency based on keywords. But mostly every ‘semantic’ tool does fail once we are talking about all non-English places on earth. And there are countries which are not the U.S. – I am quite convinced of that.

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Connections Planning. What is it actually?

Oktober 20th, 2009 • View Comments Allgemein
Tags: Agencies, Analytics, Connections Planning, CRM, Definition, Ideas, Media, Planning, Presentation, Social Influence Marketing, Strategy, Tools, Trends

Since the beginning of 2009 my employer Neue Digitale / Razorfish has integrated all strategic disciplines in one Connections Planning team. As Social Influence Strategist I am part of it together with with different strategic backgrounds. I admit, I did not always feel comfortable in properly defining the different Planning Concepts. And the rather ‘new’ Connections Planning idea adds just one more label to the different strategic disciplines which can exist in an agency.

Our concept of Connections Planning integrates the work of Account and Brand Planners as well as Media and Analytics, and Social Media. Its core idea is to engage customers where they are and not by putting the customer’s media use into the center of attention. Its goal is to use the strength of data-driven marketing activities and integrate all other disciplines to strategically interact with the user and maximize value for all stakeholders.

Connections Planning is a young term. And there are some definitions around and some agencies might find different approaches for the same term. The reason for this post is, I found two interesting decks lately which revolve around the term ‘Connections Planning’. And both are pretty insightful and definitely worth to take a look at.

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Social Media Intelligence. We sell or else.

September 22nd, 2009 • View Comments Intelligence
Tags: Analytics, Business, Diagram, Intelligence, Monitoring, Prediction, Strategy, Trends, World

Something’s happening out there in the outer social space. And while me, my coworkers and many, many others still try to explain Social Media Monitoring to  clients, a couple of interesting questions were recently raised by a couple of intelligent people. One of them was Bud Caddell who criticized the idea of sentiment analysis. His criticism revolves around the fact that monitoring tools which are based on semantic analysis do most often offer quick overview diagrams which say something like “62% of all users in the social web like your product” (or similar).

Bud argues:

Here is what I think: sentiment analysis won’t ever be enough, and not because of sarcasm or industry specific slang, but because we are measuring the WRONG thing. It’s about the effect, not the content of the message.

I basically agree. We are making the same mistakes again. The same mistakes that were made by the marketing industry for ages by setting up big surveys which anticipate answers we have to give in case we fail. No doubt, only few human beings want to fail. But there is a difference between a survey and the right action afterwards. According to ABC News/Washington Post polls 75% of all Americans approved Bush’s handling of the situation in Iraq when the war started in 2003. According to this sentiment analysis Bush’s decision was completely justified.

Do you understand what I mean? There is a deeper problem.

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