Social Media Monitoring: Worth It?

A well-known company that tracks social media is trying to sell me on using its service.  The cost: $500/month.  I love automation.  But when a thing is automated it should deliver consistent, high-quality performance — and be cheap.  I don’t think social media monitoring services are there yet.

The company is Cision, owned by Berkshire Hathaway.  Their core product: online, continuously-updated media lists.  From recent experience, I know that these lists pull too much irrelevant data and must be manually purged of at least 50% of entries before they’re any use. In fairness, I haven’t yet test-driven Cision’s social media monitoring product. But given my experience with the media list side of the house, my bias against the monitoring service is somewhat automatic.  When I or a staff member have to spend hours fixing a media list, some chemical reaction in my brain triggers an immediate visceral response: “This thing is worth 5 bucks maybe, not 500!”

For those who’re interested, there are scores of social media monitoring services, all bona fide players: BurrellesLuce, CustomScoop, CyberAlert, J.D. Power Web Intelligence, Media Miser, Metrica, Nielsen BlogPulse, Reprise Media, and Sentiment Metrics, to name a few. I tested one — CyberAlert — a few months back, on behalf of a client.

CyberAlert’s people were super-nice and professional, and explained that my first few reports would be chock-full of old blogs as the system played catch-up.  Boy was that ever true: Took me an hour and a half to crawl through the first one!  After a few days the flood stemmed to a manageable flow.  What I quickly discovered & went on to confirm in my month-long test:

1. Most entries were rubbish: job ads, execrably bad employee-made videos tucked away in the far reaches of YouTube and so on.
2. CyberAlert missed key postings that I knew existed.  Guess where I found them? — Google.

In a word, I found this social media monitoring service to be very much like online media list services: inaccurate and incomplete.  Almost like it was. . .automated!

Google worked just fine.  As I type these words I know I will one day regret flakking for the next great soul-less monopoly that needs to be busted up so that smaller players can vie in an open, competitive marketplace.  There is no doubt in my mind that Google has the potential to become the next iteration of the American Bell System or Microsoft.  But for now, you can’t beat Google’s performance.  And you can never beat free.

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