"Every company should be listening on the social web"

What do users discuss on social media? Various tools and service providers bring light into the darkness.There is a large selection of social media monitoring tools on the market. It is not easy for a company to maintain an overview. MK spoke to various providers of tools and services for monitoring social networks.Monitoring as an early warning systemWith the social media monitoring service from Argus, brands worldwide can monitor their mentions on blogs, Twitter (Firehouse), public Facebook posts, YouTube, Google+, Instagram and Tublr. "Every company should listen on the social web. Because without knowing how and who is talking about a company, a brand or relevant topics online, companies cannot plan and implement targeted measures," says Ueli Weber, Head of Sales, Marketing & Analysis at Argus. "Whether companies are actively present on social media channels or not, they will be talked about either way." Monitoring therefore not only provides the opportunity to engage in dialog with opinion leaders and potential customers, but also shows where they are taking place and can therefore serve as an early warning system. "Whether B2C or B2B companies: Social media monitoring is an important part of digital communication, because it's about customer service, quality assurance, image maintenance, customer discussions and much more. "Weber sees the biggest challenges on the customer side in social media monitoring as often being too small a budget, a lack of know-how and cross-departmental collaboration. "Added to this is the difficulty of assessing the quality and performance of the many tool providers. The requirements for monitoring vary in terms of options and costs depending on the needs," explains Weber. If a company wants to start professionally in this area from the outset, it is important to think about the specific goals to be achieved with social media monitoring.Hirslanden relies on Argus AvenueA customer who has relied on the Software Argus Avenue for social media monitoring is the Hirslanden Private Hospital Group. It launched its social media presence at the end of May 2013 and decided to purchase an external tool for monitoring. "The private hospital group's social media team consists of a single person, which is why we focused on a simple, clear and resource-saving solution when evaluating the software," says Stefan Lienhard, Project Manager Social Media Hirslanden. "It was also important that the keywords to be monitored could be adapted quickly and easily, that multilingual monitoring was guaranteed and that the tool offered a way of generating standardized daily reports." Hirslanden has found the right monitoring software in Argus Avenue. After around a year of use, the software has, for example, helped Hirslanden to revise and optimize its internal monitoring process (offline and online).Tonality analysis still immatureThe full-service agency Goldbach Interactive supports companies in selecting the right monitoring tools, helps with setup and maintenance and offers training, support and advice during use. According to Stephanie Wörmann, Senior Consultant Social Media at Goldbach Interactive, monitoring helps to prevent crises (shitstorms), adjust positioning in relation to the competition, evaluate marketing activities, understand the customer, even conduct market research if necessary and offer customer service via social media channels (social care).Wörmann sees a particular need to catch up with the tools when it comes to so-called tonality analysis: "Currently, the technologies used are not yet sophisticated enough to reliably distinguish negative posts from neutral ones. Irony and dialect in particular pose a major challenge for automated sentiment recognition. Negative words not only have to be recognized, but also understood in context." On the customer side, there is often a lack of the necessary human resources to process the tools. There is also room for improvement when it comes to evaluating and profitably using the information generated."Just observing is useless"Adobe offers Adobe Social, a social media management platform that goes beyond simple monitoring to analyze and manage all social channels, blogs and forums via a single solution. The platform is aimed at medium and large companies that are active in several markets or even globally. "To build effective relationships to influence customers' purchasing decisions and strengthen brand loyalty, marketers need to deliver the right message to the right audience and keep track of complex social network processes," says Angelo Buscemi, Country Manager Adobe Switzerland. "But simply observing social media is ultimately useless. It's much more about entering into a dialog with stakeholders at an early stage and deriving marketing strategies or business decisions from the monitoring."Evaluation as a challengeAccording to Buscemi, simply monitoring social media is relatively easy and there are already numerous solutions for this. It becomes more challenging when the results of the monitoring are to be evaluated. "Only a few providers can offer a complete solution that allows social media to be monitored, analyzed, managed and interlinked. "One global company that uses Adobe Social is Sony. "It is important for the company to understand what conversations are taking place on social media about the brand and, above all, how this information can be capitalized on," explains Buscemi. The real challenge for Sony is not so much to collect and monitor customer comments about the brand and its products, but rather to analyze this information and extract a customer view that can be incorporated into concrete business decisions and used as a basis for marketing activities.Guide for storytellingThe company Brandwatch has dedicated itself entirely to social media monitoring and offers software for this purpose. "More and more conversations are taking place online and Twitter is also becoming increasingly important in the German-speaking market," says Susanne Ullrich, Marketing Manager DACH at Brandwatch. "People are exchanging information publicly on the social web almost every minute, often also about products and services from companies." It is therefore absolutely essential for a company to know where, by whom and on what topics it is being talked about. "This is the only way they can react in good time and, above all, be informed about which campaigns and services are perceived as positive or negative by the public." In addition, social media monitoring is increasingly serving as a guide for storytelling and content production. "Monitoring tools can be used to find out which topics are currently of interest to your own target group so that content can be tailored accordingly and real-time marketing is becoming increasingly important," says Ullrich.Definition of goals is crucialUllrich sees the biggest challenge in social media monitoring in the definition of objectives. "If it's not clear which departments, processes and strategies monitoring should support, you usually don't gain the comprehensive insights that would be possible." In addition, there is often still a lack of cross-departmental use of monitoring. "PR and marketing, which currently often introduce monitoring in companies, are faced with the challenge of involving other departments such as sales, customer service or product management," says Ullrich. In the Swiss market, various customers use social media monitoring from Brandwatch, including AEW Energie AG, CSS Versicherung, HOPPE AG, SR Technics, St. Galler Kantonalbank and well-known agencies such as Ogilvy Interactive and Kuble AG. "The fields of application are diverse and range from market analysis to optimizing customer service and gaining insights into product development," says Ullrich.An overview of the most popular social media tools can be found in the "Social Media Monitoring Tool Report 2013". Author: Simon Wolanin