Why Social Media Monitoring is A Waste of Time
Social Media Monitoring is a waste of time and money. There the cat is out of the bag. All those amazing tools that exist like Radian6, Visible Technologies, Lithium, ViralHeat, Social Mention and hundreds of others are a complete waste of your time and money. Let me explain why.
Social Media Monitoring Is Pointless
Full disclosure, my company offers Social Media Monitoring services – this is not a pitch. Here is why social media monitoring is pointless – because just seeing what social consumers are saying about you is meaningless unless there is an action plan that leads to follow up. Unfortunately most companies fail to realize that social media monitoring, whether done in house or by a third party doesn't mean that the workload is reduced by the use of a tool.
There needs to be a strategy behind the results. That strategy has to be effective and include a plan for both good and bad mentions. I've seen quite a few examples in the past week of companies that are either not bothering to monitor their social media accounts as closely as they should or are only looking for amplification of their message. Therein lies one of the problems, just because your organization decides to use social media as a marketing tool, doesn't mean that your consumers will see it as a marketing channel. If they find that you have a Twitter account for example, they are going to use that as a point of entry to your customer service process whether you created it for that purpose or not.
Social Media Monitoring – Good, Bad & Mediocre
I recently stayed at the Hotel Max in Seattle. I had a very good experience with them and decided to write a Yelp review of them. Within a day I had received a response from the team there thanking me for my review. I then noticed that they had in fact responded to every review – good and bad and where the reviewer had a less than optimum experience they had apologized and asked how they could fix the problem. The hotel has received 214 reviews – every one of them has received a response from the team at the hotel. That is good Social Media Monitoring.
On Twitter this weekend I saw a rather ironic event. Frank Eliason, who can quite possibly be credited with being the forefather of great customer service via social media during his time at ComCast, reached out to Audi to say that he wasn't happy with the Audi roadside assistance, he was waiting for a service vehicle to come and get him. I noticed this and followed up with Frank to see if Audi ever contacted him as I couldn't find a response on their stream. Audi didn't. In fact they were completely silent that day, the following day their stream consists of chatting with "Fans". This was definitely a failure to monitor and act accordingly.
Delta Airlines were equally silent when a video of American troops returning home from duty in Afghanistan hit the social media world. The troops had been charged after a confusion over extra baggage. The video – posted to YouTube and then reposted to Facebook and Twitter created a small storm among social media users. Delta responded on their Facebook wall and eventually on Twitter. I think they did somethings right and some things wrong. Firstly what they got wrong – silence. This is basic customer service – allowing customers to create the story and having no response is not the way to handle things. Respond immediately, even if your response is only – "We hear you and we are going to look into this". What Delta did right was to fix the issue, they actually rewrote their policy based on this incident, which is great customer service, but they could have silenced their critics faster had they told people they were working on a solution.
Social Media Monitoring – Don't Waste Your Time
The point of all this is, if you aren't prepared to act, then don't stroke your ego's by simply monitoring to see how many "fans" you have out there. Sure it's nice to know that people think highly of your brand and to be able to pull quotes from social media sources to include in your client/C-suite presentations, but those are meaningless if you are going to let the real opportunities slip pass.
Social Media Monitoring gives an organization the opportunity to not only respond but actually change the way they do business and make them more competitive. What are you using Social Media Monitoring for?
Image used under CC license – anderscismo
