So Social Media tracking - it’s a new buzz word.  But what does it mean?

In a nutshell, it means reading and making sense of all the stuff written on the web by people who find the time and energy to do it.  You know, blogs, forums, wikis, twitter and all that.  It’s like a combination of market research and conversational eavesdropping.  More traditional methods of market research use people with clipboards, telephone surveys or more recently, online panels to ask ‘consumers’  questions.  This is both a strength and a weakness.  The strength is that it’s very targeted.  Questions like “What do you think of Gordon Brown?”, “Rate your experience of the customer service call you just made to Vodafone?” will get you answers, but, sometimes it’s the questions that aren’t asked that could deliver the most useful information like “Are you thinking of switching to those evil iphone lovers over at O2?”.  Furthermore, the survey can introduce a bias - who did they ask (it’s always a sample) and did the questions or the questioners influence the response?

Social media monitoring, by contrast, takes the Internet as its data source and tries to make sense of it.  That’s to say, there are no questions, no prompting and a lot less sampling.  So, in theory, it’s a good thing, but it’s a lot harder to do.  For instance, with a simple Q&A, the data is clean and very well structured. Extracting what someone thinks about a product, a politician or a service from a piece they write in a blog, or a post in a forum is a much bigger challenge.  Imagine having a conversation with someone about your mobile phone.  Most likely you would talk about a bunch of different things and not all of them would be about the phone.  Some might be about the network, something you did with it, like drop it or leave it on a train and you are likely to stray off- topic during the chat and mention something else that happened to you recently.  It’s a normal conversation and if I was eavesdropping, I might have to have a bit of a think before telling someone else what you said about your Sony Ericsson.  Social media monitoring faces the same challenge.

So that’s it ? It’s just all a bit hard?  Well no, that was my intro!  But give me minute!

There are some fancy things that modern computers can do, such as getting a feel for ‘sentiment’ by looking at and analysing the words that are used, pulling out common phrases and putting together summaries and graphs that help you see what’s going on.  It’s not as focused as a survey, but, as I say, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.  And this whole area is coming along in leaps and bounds at the moment so be prepared to be amazed at what will be possible over the next couple of years.  For example, imagine being able to use the collective intelligence of the Internet to your advantage.  OK, that’s a bit fluffy and borg-like (sorry non-trekkies), but type your name into pipl.com and you might be surprised at how a reasonably simple system can gather information about you and summarise it in a slightly spooky way.

So what’s worth tracking?

Well, if there is something that gets loads of chat on the web, chances are that your day job will prevent you from reading it all and trying to make some sense of it.  So that’s your starting point.  Do you care what people are saying about the new BlackBerry Bold or are you a marketer that has some responsibility for a well known brand or a client?  If so, and you find that Google Alerts start taking over your inbox within a couple of days, you might want to consider checking out the some of the tools that people have developed to do a better job of it.

How do know what’s worth looking at?

Good question.  Do you care what people are twittering about?  Maybe you do if there’s some tweet firestorm (I now own that phrase!) going on out there.  But, chances are there will be forums that are big news in your sector - like pistonheads for the auto guys or moneysavingsexpert for finance types.  Those you will want to track.  So too will be influential bloggers - although knowing who is influential or not isn’t always a simple task.  Then there are all those comments on the big news sites - a lot of people read and contribute to those and there is some extremely useful insight in amongst the petty private battles that pop up.  I’m sure you know a lot of the influential sites and sources in your sector, but monitoring them often isn’t so easy.

What about social networks?

Ah yes, what about poking or throwing sheep at your friends on Facebook, virtually stalking Mika on myspace, getting serious on LinkedIn, or doing something teenagery on Bebo.  Unfortunately for Social Media Analysis software, a lot of those virtual playgrounds are locked down.  No invite, no dancing.  But even with an invite, you’re not allowed to bring friends so getting some automated system in there to try to read the information and make sense of (the enormous amount) it is, so far, not something that can be done.  But I’m sure that over the next couple of years, there will be a way to anonomyse it, aggregate it and analyse it for the benefit of all (demonic smile!)

So, if I want to track social media conversations about my brand, where do I start?

With the best of course!  Check out my tool at Brandwatch.net!  (Shameless plug).  The end.

So, last week Google launched its new web-browser Chrome (I would have written about it before, but was nowhere near my blog for most of the week - sorry!).  I’ve downloaded it and played with a bit and it’s…err….OK.  I think, given the hype in the media and the blogs of the past week that it might have been more special than it is.  It’s fast, I’ll give you that.  But, I dont think Firefox need worry!

Right now, the browser market splits pretty much in three: Microsoft’s Internet Explorer which has 75% of the market (largely due to the fact that it comes pre-installed on any PC running Windows); Mozilla Firefox (God’s own broswer) has around 20% of the market and the other 5% is made up of the lesser known browsers like Opera, Maxthon, Safari (Macs) etc.

The install was quite easy and it pulled in all my bookmarks, passwords and search history easily from Firefox.  The tabs are simple and clean and there’s the obvious integration with Google search.  But, in terms of add-ons, Google are gonna have to play catch-up fast.  There are so many things in Firefox that I have come to rely on that it’s going to take more than a brand like Google to pull me away from.

Here’s what it looks like.  Like Google Search, it’s clean, simple and well executed.  One standard feature I quite like is the ‘Most Visited’ panels when you open a new tab.  It’s a bit like Firefox’s ‘Fast Dial’ add-on but not as good…

So, what can I say?  It’s OK, but I’m a digital marketing consultant not a techie.  For me, as long as it does what it should in handling properly the myriad of web technologies that sites out there are built in, then I guess it will do OK with Google’s backing.  If it doesn’t, then Google will either need to fix it or forget it.

You can download Google Chrome here: http://www.google.com/chrome