Don’t Trust Your Conversation Data May 25
The race is on to find the perfect social media monitoring tool. A number of big players, including SAS, IBM and Microsoft, have entered the playing field to compete with some of the original players, such as Radian6, Biz360 and Scout Labs.
But the fact is, no single tool is perfect. Whether dealing with the difficulties of Facebook privacy issues, capturing accurate sentiment, filtering out spam or trying to pull in the most relevant conversation data for the brand or organization, no tool can do it all. The perfect technology solution for social media monitoring simply does not exist.
This means that users of such tools need to be extremely critical of the conversation data they’re using. While the tools are powerful—and a great start to drawing insightful conclusions—users need to be checking for irrelevant posts, constantly updating keyword search strings, considering the best approach to tracking sentiment (human vs. automated), keeping an eye out for content duplication and watching some conversations (brand Facebook walls, for example) more closely on a manual basis.
Don’t blindly trust your conversation data. To use a simple metaphor, post data should be approached like a garden—weed daily and apply regular maintenance to avoid becoming overrun with content you don’t want.
