Undoubtedly today, your company has or is thinking of establishing a presence in the social media universe. Looking back just a few years, these days seem to be a repeat of the frontier years when we started to look at the corporate website as the new wave of advertising platform for business organisations. The message was direct, in-your-face, praise singing of our company’s history, structure, services and products.

For many of us, social media seems like a repeat of the above – make that mistake at your peril. It’s not just a new advertising platform and it’s not just about self-promotion. It is something that in reality is more than that. To put it in simple terms – it’s not a “broadcast” medium, which to an extent many corporate websites remain till today, treating visitors in a uniform, one-size-fits-all manner. It’s very much about engagement with your customers, community and different audiences which you would want to reach in different ways.

Social media platforms have become the metaphorical and ephemeral ‘all things to all people’; an outlet for political views, sharing of hobbies, discussion of the latest in fashion, sports and culture. For companies, social media presents a new challenge – more so since many of today’s marketers are themselves rather new to the game. Look at almost any university marketing syllabus of just three or four years ago and social media and its harnessing were nowhere to be found. So what self-appointed gurus in social media marketing are out there, are in the main self-taught who have tried, or are trying by trial and error, to figure out how to turn social media interaction and advertising into bottom-line revenue for their company.

There are some very creative people and those with some grounding in psychology and a knack for marketing, may indeed be running, what are perceived to be, very effective marketing programmes online. Combining them with a half decent marketing budget and some return seems to materialise in terms of sales. Some unfortunately look at mundane performance indicators such as “likes” (to borrow the Facebook parlance) and take a significant increase in these to justifiably be linked to some occasional blip in sales. Strictly speaking the two could be linked, but generally speaking, if one looks even deeper at these “likes”, it often turns out that the people affecting them are friends, relatives and from demographic groups which don’t match the marketers’ intended target. More often than not this does not translate into sales.

In such situations, marketers may resort to interpreting these so called “Likes” as a mechanism with which to gauge the popularity of their company’s product or service.  Again if you gauge how often you “like” something in the social media space, frequently even a nice image of a sports car or a witty catch line are enough and indeed your “like” may have nothing whatsoever to do with whether the product is good or bad or the service worth paying for or not.

So given that it all sounds so fuzzy, what can today’s marketers do when their CEO or board of directors want to know whether those marketing euros spent on social media are actually giving some sort of payback?

Quietly in the background, a new method of measurement of these kinds of platforms and the “payback” they bring has been emerging; with no formal name to it, let’s for the purposes of this article call it social analytics.

Analytics is frequently associated with business intelligence and data warehousing. The few social analytics platforms that have emerged have their roots in this same discipline.

Social analytics – What’s it all about?

The rise of today’s social media platforms have allowed these same companies to open up their platforms to developers using Application Programme Interfaces (APIs). Given that companies like Facebook and LinkedIn, today command such huge membership and audiences, the use of APIS presents a practical opportunity for other companies to share in the “mindshare” of these members.

Companies such as Zynga, a social games developer, epitomise the typical player in the social media platform’s partner ecosystem. One other important aspect that platform providers expose is access to their data in the public domain. These data sources are a wealth of intelligence about the modern consumer of social media content. Metrics such as usage patterns, preferences to particular forms of content, gender related patterns of behaviour, demographic groups and sentiment towards brands, products and companies can with the right tools be visualised – (by using charts and graphs) and analysed and presented in such a way that is clear, interpretable and above all meaningful to management.

Being able to compare patterns before and after specific campaigns, or using such data visualisation techniques to target specific user groups – based on their location, age, social (marital) status and other parameters – is a very powerful tool to have in the hands of a marketer.

Given the proliferation across the world of social media platforms and the heavy penetration across demographic groups and geographies, the data samples that can be drawn from these reservoirs of data are arguably as good as any traditional marketing firm’s resource or better.

Social analytics therefore are tools that can interpret the “big data” that resides online. By using powerful associative technologies which help realise the intricate linkage between different artefacts of data, combined with speedy in-memory processing techniques, new facts about customers, product and consumer perception can be uncovered and allow a company to take the necessary course correction or evolve new features in their product in direct response to the results of social analytical analysis. 

What do these tools cost and where do you find them?

Many of these tools can be found as online services on the internet, based on a subscription model. Some companies also offer custom software which can be bought and used perpetually (in-house) as well as being installed on a company’s network.

The choice of social analytics is dependent on a variety of factors – among these are ease of use by business users, price, flexibility of the tool in terms of being able to slice, dice and analyse data in a multi-dimensional way and a host of other aspects which may suit a company’s marketing personnel.

Pierre Mallia, managing director, iMovo Limited – The know your client company.