A couple of weeks ago, uberVU was on stage at the Under The Radar, the leading early stage technology innovation conference in the world. We were delighted to present in such great company and to get a chance to showcase our perspective on the social media space.
Key takeaways:
- the social media space is very noisy
- integrating social media with current business practices and systems is key
As soon as the presentation was over, the common reaction was “this is a very crowded space“. This is completely understandable, because “social” is the hottest buzzword around since “SEO” or “web 2.0“, and many companies are using it. All this does is confuse people. I remember when, about a year ago, we got asked how we’re different from Bit.ly, the URL shortener. Here’s how we see the social media landscape, hopefully this will help you get a clearer picture of this space. We break up the space into a few useful categories:
- Monitoring/Listening – tools like these scour the web for mentions of a keyword phrase and provide a few graphs and charts on top. These tools have traditionally been used by PR departments and agencies to monitor a brand’s reputation
- Analytics/Measurement – these tools usually crunch mentions to understand their sentiment, influence, demographic info and so on. They’re usually used to report on campaigns or do some marketing research.
- Engagement/Management – very useful if you want to manage your Facebook page or Twitter account or if you need to engage with someone mentioning your brand.
- Reporting – very few tools offer a way to create reports based on social media mentions and KPIs like Sentiment or Fan Growth. The reports are usually created weekly, monthly or quarterly to be shared with customers (by agencies) or managers (by internal departments). You can think of these as more like business intelligence platforms.
- Social Collaboration / Social CRM / Social Relationship Management – this is a pretty new category of tools that perfectly shows where the whole space is going. A few companies are betting on the fact that most business goals that brands want to achieve through social media combine some of the above tools and processes. In Customer Service, for example, if someone posts a problem on Twitter, you need to be able to monitor for that problem, engage that person, collaborate with someone else on your team who can actually solve the problem and then measure and report on how using social media for Customer Service actually impacted your regular Customer Service KPIs. So tools from multiple categories are needed to solve this use case. The Social CRM tools are trying to bridge some of that gap.
We agree with the Social CRM guys’ vision but think this is just the first step in the process. In order to really achieve the types of business goals that brands expect, the key is to be able to integrate social media throughout existing business processes and software. Maybe that’s done through a handful of tools that are deeply integrated, or just through an API that plugs into existing BI, CRM and reporting systems. There are many options here. But the point is that we need to bring business context to social media in order to get value out of it. “Doing” social media or “engagement” for the sake of it is meaningless.
