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Social Media Monitoring Tools by Department

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As fast as social media is growing, the number of tools to automate data collection and analysis of social media is growing even faster. Originally, most of these tools were for brand monitoring, then came tools for monitoring social media for customer service purposes, identifying individuals who needed assistance. And in the past week I've talked to a number of companies building tools specifically for social media market research.

Each department has its own unique social media monitoring needs:

• Market Research – Researchers need to do ad hoc analysis of social media content to supplement traditional research projects. They are interested in understanding the demographics of people who comment on the products and services they are studying. Timeliness is less important to them then detailed archives: for instance, here Twitter’s two weeks of search is inadequate, especially for low-volume brands; researchers would love access to six months of tweets.
• Marketing – Where researchers are trying to understand markets, marketers are trying to influence them. They want to identify commenters with influence: whether they are traditional journalists, up and coming bloggers, or just individuals with large social networks. They are as concerned with how many subscribers, followers and friends a commenter has and what the comment was. Marketing departments love their dashboards, and want to track consumer sentiment over time, as well as tie it into specific marketing campaigns. PR folks, meanwhile, have been tracking mentions since the days of clipping services and want to see how the brands they represent are doing in comparison to competing brands.
• Service Monitoring – Marketing folks will certainly intervene with influencers when appropriate, but Customer Service departments want to contact every single person who mentions a problem, even if they are friendless, followerless and subscriberless. They will reach out on multiple channels, from the social media channel they find the cry for help on to checking their CRM system to identify the comment and reach out by email or even phone. They are interested in reports that track priorities, response times and case management details.

Eventually there may be one suite to rule them all, one enterprise application that encompasses the social monitoring needs of these and other departments, but for now I expect to see continued proliferation of different tools for different folks.

As you experiment with social media monitoring applications, please let us know your experiences: what works for you, and what’s not quite there yet.