Social Media Monitoring (sometimes called social media listening or conversation monitoring) is widely recognized as one of the first social media best practices. It is the first step in getting to know and understand the behavior and needs of an online audience. Most companies that are engaged in this activity have an internal team or outsource the effort to their agency.
There is no shortage of tools/platforms available to monitor your key terms. Companies like Radian6, Techrigy, Nielsen and Cymphony are quite busy these days rolling out new partnerships and product features, all aimed at providing more meaningful data and better ways to use it. It’s the no-brainer call right? Fire up a tool and plug in some terms, and voila, instant answers.
However, I’ve begun to notice inconsistencies in the data that different social media monitoring tools produce. The dirty little secret or so it seems, is they aren’t all working with the same data sources. For this post, I want to discuss some differences between Radian6 and Techrigy SM2. This is not meant as a criticism of either tool, because I think they are both fantastic at what they do, but rather an attempt to highlight an issue, generate a public conversation around it so that everyone using Radian6 or SM2 can benefit.
Some background: While doing a recent set of searches for a brand using the EXACT same keywords and phrases, without using source filters, the results look different. Take a moment to view the charts below for R6 and SM2 results.
Now, ignoring the fact that both tools have some differences in categories, focus on the main sources of online conversation. Blogs, forums and micromedia (Twitter).
You’ll see a dramatically higher number of blog results for Radian6 compared to SM2 (266 to 91). And for forums, vice versa (SM2 has 396 to Radian6 200).
While I expect to find subtle variations in the results between tools, I DO NOT expect to be put into a position to question which tool is “right” and which is “wrong”. Perhaps that isn’t the way to look at it though. Is the real answer an aggregate of both data sets? If so, how does one easily filter out the unique data versus duplicates?
This may raise additional questions that you need to ask yourself before selecting a monitoring solution.
Which subset, or channel, of social media does a particular tool specialize in?
Does this data mean if you know your audience is spending time on forums, SM2 may be better solution? Perhaps. Perhaps not. I suspect there is more to this than it appears on the surface. Hopefully someone else that is also monitoring can shed some light. With any luck, we can get some folks from both companies to chime in (David Alston, Amber Naslund, Jimmy Rey, Connie Bensen – any takers?)
UPDATED: I’ve been contacted by both Radian6 and Techrigy representatives, and am working with them to identify the source of the problems. After we have resolved the issue and feel confident about the source, I will update again.
