common barriers to social listening & how to overcome them

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2014

About the Pie ChartThe data presented in the chart is derived from the 2013 Gleanster survey on Social Relationship Management and the 2013 Gleanster survey on Social Listening. The surveys garnered responses from 314 and 247 participants, respectively. The data presented in the body of this report reflects the findings from those surveys, including subsets of data taken from them and representing responses from across multiple industries.

The data serves as the basis for this Gleansight Deep Dive, which provides analyst commentary related to a particular aspect of the topic. The objective is to provide additional perspective and illuminate certain key considerations regarding the implementation of the related technology-enabled business initiative.

To learn more about Gleanster’s research methodology, please click here or email [email protected].

Deep Dive

Common Barriers to Social Media Monitoring & How to Overcome Them

ANCHORING STAT

PERCENTAGE OF TOP PERFORMERS

64%

reporting they are not as effective as they could be with social media monitoring efforts.

Social media monitoring tools provide a structured – and in most cases turnkey – solution for organizations to measure the impact of social media. But research suggests that social media monitoring tools are largely being adopted in a handful of core industries such as retail, manufacturing, consumer packaged goods, hospitality, and ecommerce. Generally we see adoption among organizations with 1) consumer-oriented products and services and 2) a large population of target users online. Because of this, social media monitoring technology adoption has largely established traction in upper midsize to enterprise organizations with social media teams that have dedicated roles and responsibilities for social media monitoring. This Deep Dive will explore emerging trends in social media adoption, specifically five common barriers to adoption of social media monitoring tools.

The Rise of Social Media Roles on the Org ChartBefore jumping into the five barriers, it’s important to highlight the emerging trends we have seen over the last 10 years with respect to headcount. Many organizations learned early on that supporting social media was more than a part-time endeavor. What began as small investments in interns and

marketing managers quickly blossomed into full teams with roles like VP of Social Media. But staffing these teams can be a challenge. It’s actually quite difficult to find experienced people who have proven strategies for driving return on investment in social media efforts.

This also poses challenges with headcount structure. According to research from the Q2 Social Listening

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Common Barriers to Social Media Monitoring & How to Overcome Them 2


Top Performers Defined

Gleanster uses 2-3 key performance indicators (KPIs) to distinguish “Top Performers” from all other companies (“Everyone Else”) within a given data set, thereby establishing a basis for benchmarking best practices. By definition, Top Performers are comprised of the top quartile of qualified survey respondents (QSRs).

The KPIs used for distinguishing Top Performers focus on performance metrics that speak to year-over-year improvement in relevant, measurable areas. Not all KPIs are weighted equally.

The KPIs used to distinguish Top Performers in this Deep Dive include:

• Revenue growth

• Active use of social media channels

0% 50% 100%50%100%

Top 2 channels used to engage customers & prospects

In your opinion, is your organization capable of predicting return on

investment in the following channels?

EMAIL

SEARCH

SOCIAL MEDIASOCIAL

SEARCH

EMAIL

Yes, All Respondents All Respondents

78%

84%

22%

92%

75%

68%

Figure 1: No Predictable ROI from Social Media

report, 8 out of 10 organizations support social media efforts in marketing. A full 67% of survey respondents actually had “Social Media Manager” roles on staff. But where do social media resources actually sit? There are strategic considerations, analytical considerations, technology considerations, and operational process components to social media. You need staff that can not only engage on behalf of the brand, but apply logic, analytics, and modeling to help justify the effort accordingly.

From a technology perspective a centralized social media monitoring tool certainly helps by centralizing insights, routing action based on business rules, and standardizing reporting requirements. But when many stakeholders across leadership, marketing, and service may benefit from social data, a single platform can also be limiting in terms of supporting different social media roles and stakeholders. Generally, a core set of users have sufficient knowledge (or access) to the social monitoring tools, and reporting is limited to keywords or trends that are populated in the system.

Where’s R in the Social Media ROI Equation?Historically social media garnered considerable attention from the CMO and the CEO – especially after sites like Facebook and Twitter broke the 500M user mark. All things considered, social media remains a top two channel for engaging customers and prospects, but it’s still a difficult channel to measure. (See Figure 1.)

Enter the value of social media monitoring tools. Most of the time, when we talk about ROI, we measure return as a tangible quantitative metric. But when it comes to social media monitoring, there are also qualitative considerations to factor into benefits. Here are common metrics used to measure the return on social media monitoring:

• Engagement• Likes• Comments• Re-tweets• Sentiment• Web traffic• Impressions• Mentions

* Q4 2013 Gleanster Social Relationship Management Survey, n=314




• Followers or fans• Revenue• Customer profiling• Satisfaction• Customer service• Customer satisfaction• Brand monitoring• Call volume (in Customer Service &

Support)• Conversions• Lead capture• Sales ready opportunities sourced

Challenges with Social Media MonitoringGenerating actionable insights from social listening means being able to create structure around unstructured data. Of course, unstructured data accounts for the vast majority of content that resides in social networks, blogs, wikis, and ratings and review sites. All of the words and sentences (and all of the fragments of words and sentences, including the plethora of new-to-the-

world abbreviations and acronyms) that people post and share and comment on can be said to fall beneath the umbrella of unstructured data.

The challenge lies in being able to continuously mine the terabytes of unstructured data, separating relevant content from idle chatter, and generate insights that drive true business value. To that end, companies are working to implement the right enabling technologies, organizational resources, and business processes to capture, disseminate and act upon the insights that reside in social media.

Some are also working to integrate and enhance social data with other consumer information, including CRM and other voice-of-the-customer data, to create more robust customer profiles.

Capabilities around social data analysis are becoming increasingly sophisticated and widespread. Using both manual and automated techniques to look at

“...unstructured data accounts for the vast majority of content that resides in social

networks, blogs, wikis, and ratings and review

sites.”

52%

69%

72%

78%

0% 50% 100%

Training

Lack of time

Resource skills

Difficult to analyze social data

All Respondents

Difficulty with Social Media Monitoring Tools

Figure 2: Top 4 Challenges with Social Media Monitoring

* Q4 2013 Gleanster Social Relationship Management Survey, n=314




the subtle nuances of language, brands can readily identify emerging patterns and outliers, making it possible to find the comments that are truly relevant, put the conversations in context, and ultimately paint a more complete picture of what people are saying and why it matters to the brand. They can isolate conversations about specific topics and conduct searches that are sensitive to all the different ways people communicate online. Beyond generating actionable insights from the content itself, companies are becoming increasingly adept at being able to determine who, exactly, is doing the talking in terms of their demographic and psychographic makeup, and even their actual identities.

Translating Social Media to Actionable InsightsSocial media monitoring tools are designed to offer turnkey insights around trends based on keywords, phrases and digital properties. In essence, the tools are sort of like your own personal search engine spider that crawls the web and looks for mentions of your brand, products, or other related keywords in your industry. They also connect with your social media properties to monitor what your

followers and customers say and allow you to drill down on aggregate trends and respond to individual engagement if necessary.

But so what? So you are monitoring and you have dashboards that derive insights about who’s saying what. Now what? What do you actually do with these insights? For example, if you are monitoring sentiment and you find out that 60% of your customers say positive things about your brand, what do you do with that information?

Recommendation:

• This is where you need to lean on the different skillsets for social relationship management to help isolate ongoing action you can take based on insights in social media monitoring. Help isolate what to do and when in a methodical way to make social decisions scalable for the organization. It will likely require someone with proactive skills or even leadership skills to help prioritize efforts around social media monitoring. If, for example, you don’t have a strategic or analytical social media role in your organization, consider engaging a third party or agency on a short-term basis to

Strategic Goals Monitor On Social Actions to TakeGrow # of followers Monitor post to follower

ratios and trends. Develop best practices for content and communications you can replicate to drive followers.

Engage loyal customers Sentiment on customer communities / brand followers

Promote loyalty program or capture email address form social users. Develop a special promotion or program to entice loyal customers to join.

Etc.

Example Social Media Action MatrixFigure 3: Example Social Media Action Matrix




help provide best practices and prioritize key actions you will engage in with your social media monitoring efforts. You are essentially saying to yourself, if we see this, we will do that. Consider developing a very basic table or one-page overview of the top 3-5 ways your organization will be using social media insights. (See Figure 3.) Start by listing strategic objectives or goals for social media. Then determine how you would measure these goals and ultimately what you would do with the insights. This seems like a simple and obvious exercise, but analysis paralysis is a common challenge in social media monitoring tools. You can measure a lot – so much so that it can become difficult for social media resources to figure out which insights to take action on. Listing high priority objectives keeps users focused on a handful of core objectives that will help justify continued investments in social media.

Resources lack the skills to act on social media data. Staffing knowledgeable experts is a challenge with respect to social media monitoring. More often than not, users who are trained in the social media monitoring tool are also the same users who are expected to react to issues. The thing is that social media is just a channel for interacting with customers, and the common denominator is the customer. You have a variety of different internal departments that are responsible for managing customers – product marketing, research and development, service, sales, marketing, and the executive suite all answer to the customer. Each possesses a unique skillset for ultimately attracting and retaining loyal customers. The question organizations really need to ask with respect to social media monitoring is

this: are you expecting social media resources to wear all of these hats? They can’t.

Recommendation:

• Distribute responsibility for monitoring social media and closing the loop. Social media monitoring tools allow you to create standard dashboards and business rules based on thresholds. Some tools even provide workflow to automatically alert users about relevant trends. It’s naive to assume the actual users of social media monitoring tools will be sufficiently capable of addressing all the issues that come up. Meanwhile, taking action on social media insights requires context – and that context is often unique to the different roles in the organization. For example, insights around product sentiment are best delivered to product marketing or product managers in the organization. Issues with service and support are alternatively best delivered to the customer service department. The nice thing about social media monitoring tools is that these users don’t actually need to interact with the social media monitoring technology to receive these insights. Simply alerting them to issues and putting a process in place for them to escalate further discovery if need be will help spread the burden of acting appropriately on different social media insights.

Lack of time to manage social media monitoring. Let’s face it, social media isn’t the only thing you are measuring, and sometimes it feels like you are constantly focused on the next initiative. Who has time to stop and smell the roses? All too often, investments in social media monitoring tools seem very cool for weeks or even months when




insights that were previously unavailable start to surface. But over time, users start to lose interest in the same old data week after week. This is where you can and should lean heavily on social media monitoring tools to do the heavy lifting for your organization.

Recommendations:

• Most social media monitoring tools will allow users to generate thresholds on performance indicators. Trends that stray above or below a standard deviation will trigger alerts to users that something is going on that demands their attention. That frees up time for users to focus on other issues with the confidence that they will be alerted in real time when something is actually worth exploring.

• Create a standard set of dashboards for users. For each chart develop a one-sentence “statement of purpose” that outlines what the dashboard shows and how the data is to be used by the user. This is particularly effective for senior leadership. Make it super easy to derive insights. If you can’t say it in one sentence, it may be too difficult to act on the data and users won’t find it valuable. In any given day, we make the time to conduct activities that create value in our jobs. So issues with “not having time” are really just another way of saying you don’t see value in making the time.

Ongoing training for social media monitoring. Social media monitoring is still an emerging discipline. There is actually a shortage of resources with the social and analytical skills necessary to have a meaningful impact on the effort. Moreover, it’s difficult to find and retain talent, which means you may actually be rotating resources into the role

frequently. So a plan for training users is actually critical to the longevity of the effort. Make no mistake, social media is largely a needle-in-the-haystack exercise. While aggregate trends are important, you also want to isolate customer satisfaction issues early, or in some cases engage an actual sales opportunity.

Recommendations:

• Standardize key insights as much as possible using reporting and dashboards in social media monitoring tools. The nice thing about social media monitoring is that you can customize reporting and insights in a standardized and scalable way. You can even automate report delivery to key stakeholders. The more people who receive social media insights internally and are familiar with the reports, the less critical it is to retain rock star social media monitoring administrators and team members. Problems typically arise when one or two internal roles have intimate knowledge of social and that’s it. Guess what happens when they leave.

• Develop a universal social media policy for users to rapidly familiarize themselves with brand standards and strategic objectives for social media. The more you can standardize the effort, the easier it will be for users to train each other and get new resources trained on the initiative.

• Spend a little extra money and hire someone with prior experience if you have to replace talent. One huge mistake organizations make is thinking that interns or fresh-out-of-college resources are sufficient for supporting social media efforts. They can do great work, but from a strategic perspective they probably lack context around the effort. If you want to

“...social media monitoring tools

allow users to generate thresholds

on performance indicators.”




Deep Dive Talking Points• Consider developing a very basic table or one-page overview of the top 3-5

ways your organization will be using social media insights. Start by listing strategic objectives or goals for social media. Then determine how you would measure these goals and ultimately what you would do with the insights.

• Distribute responsibility for monitoring social media and closing the loop. Social media monitoring tools allow you to create standard dashboards and business rules based on thresholds. The nice thing about social media monitoring tools is that these users don’t actually need to interact with the social media monitoring technology to receive these insights.

• Create a standard set of dashboards for users. For each chart develop a one-sentence “statement of purpose” that outlines what the dashboard shows and how the data is to be used by the user.

• Standardize key insights as much as possible using reporting and dashboards in social media monitoring tools. Develop a universal social media policy for users to rapidly familiarize themselves with brand standards and strategic objectives for social media. The more you can standardize the effort, the easier it will be for users to train each other and get new resources trained on the initiative.

move the needle with social media, you need strategic thinkers who are constantly willing to innovate and try new things. Skilled resources will mitigate the risk of constantly learning what doesn’t work.




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Related ResearchRecently published research that may be of interest to senior industry practitioners include:

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Social Relationship Management Gleansight

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The Gleanster website also features carefully vetted white papers on these and other topics as well as Success Stories that bring the research to life with real-world case studies. To download Gleanster content, or to view the future research agenda, please visit www.gleanster.com.

About Gleanster Gleanster benchmarks best practices in technology-enabled business initia-tives, delivering actionable insights that allow companies to make smart business decisions and match their needs with vendor solutions.

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For more information, please visit www.gleanster.com.

http://www.gleanster.com/report/using-social-media-to-improve-product-service-launches

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http://www.gleanster.com/gleansight/social-relationship-management

http://www.gleanster.com/report/influence-marketing

http://www.gleanster.com/report/customer-journey-mapping

http://www.gleanster.com/report/how-top-performers-use-social-data-to-improve-customer-service-and-support

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