Social Listening - SWOT Analysis: Threats

1. The lack of regulation is a problem as it means that reputation monitoring companies are not held accountable for the claims that they make.
   – There is strong competition in the market, which makes it important to differentiate between the players that offer simple keyword monitoring services, and those who offer sentiment analysis and business analytics.
   
2. A lack of standard measurement techniques makes it difficult to compare different software vendors and benchmark different tools.
   
3. There needs to be a more structured approach to measurement, and integrating different types of research would add weight to the credibility of the social monitoring tools sector.
   
4. A lack of senior management understanding may prevent some companies from investing in the right tools for measurement.
   
5. Companies need to have people with the right skills to make the most of measurement data and interpret the results appropriately.
   – There is a lack of specialist expertise, which means companies may not have the right resources to manage the processes and data.
   
6. Many companies now have a presence on social networks, but may not have the right organisational culture to effect change within their company and make use of the insights generated from reputation monitoring tools.
   
7. Unless marketers can accurately demonstrate return on value, this may lead to some companies feeling the effects of social media fatigue, reducing the demand for reputation monitoring tools.
   
8. Privacy is a significant threat. Social networks, including Facebook, have faced much opposition to the amount of public data shared, and it is worth remembering monitoring tools can only make use of public data.
   – If one or more social networks become more closed, this will affect the volume of data and insights generated from social media monitoring tools.
   
9. Free tools are also a threat to vendors, as some companies may opt to use these instead of investing in buzz monitoring tool.
   
10. Another threat comes from analytics companies that have started to offer social media add-ons in addition to their main analytics suite.
    – Some customers may opt for an analytics vendor (over a buzz monitoring platform) that has specialist expertise in online measurement across the vast spectrum of online channels. 
    

Social Listening - SWOT Analysis: Opportunities

1. Social media is slowly maturing and is becoming an established part of the marketing mix, which means there will be continued demand for tools to measure its impact.
2. There is increased demand for specialist social analytics services, particularly in sectors where legal issues are fundamental to the business, such as pharmaceuticals.
3. There are more case studies about the adverse effects of not having social monitoring tools in place, providing opportunities for vendors to communicate the benefits of such software.
4. A dominant player in the industry has not yet emerged, which means the field is still open for a company to gain competitive advantage and become an industry leader.
5. More companies are looking for complete business intelligence solutions that integrate the insights from social media with other channels.
6. More companies are interested in additional consulting services to make the most of social media monitoring data. There is greater focus on understanding how to use the data.
7. There is a clear opportunity for vendors to take a research-driven approach by integrating with other data sources in order to differentiate themselves from other players in the market.
8. Although there is a wealth of different tools, there is an opportunity for a savvy vendor to offer specialist services, such as the ability to offer sentiment analysis in different languages or for different regions.
9. Social CRM is a huge area of growth, and there are opportunities for reputation monitoring companies to partner with CRM companies to garner actionable insights and justify investment. 

Social Listening - SWOT Analysis: Weaknesses

•   There is no regulatory body for the online reputation monitoring industry, which means that companies can spring up overnight, and are not always held accountable for the claims they make.
  
  
•   The weaknesses of social listening tools are that they can be limited in their scope. For example, the tools are typically unable to understand sarcasm, or understand nuances of language, or multiple meanings of similar words.
  
• 
    The market is flooded with a wealth of companies offering social listening software, which can make it difficult for customers to differentiate between all the different players in the market.
  
• 
    The large volume of data available means it is difficult for a single technology to cover all the bases, and achieve a comprehensive level of monitoring.
  
  
•   Many companies are not yet offering sentiment analysis in different languages, though they do offer monitoring, which can make it difficult for large, multinational companies to justify investment.
  
• 
    Proving ROI can still be problematic, as there is no one standard for measuring the impact of social media.
  – For companies that use more than one tool, it can be difficult to make like-for-like comparisons as each tool may use different metrics and research methodologies,
  
• 
    A significant proportion of companies are still not using these tools or may not have enough understanding of social media to understand the benefits.
  
• 
    Although some companies may be monitoring, they may not have the understanding to turn the insights into action and use the data in the right way.
  
• 
    Sentiment analysis and the accuracy of reporting is an on-going concern in the industry. Vendors need to invest more in tools to ensure that the results delivered are precise and reliable.
  
• 
    A research-led approach is needed to make the most of the insights from social listening tools in order to reap the most value for customers who have invested in this type of technology. 
  

Social Listening - SWOT Analysis: Strengths

• 
    Companies are much more aware of the benefits of listening online and buzz monitoring platforms are an essential part of the social media toolset.
  
  
  • –  More businesses are beyond the experimental stage of engaging with social media, which means the focus is on optimising social media activity, measuring value and garnering actionable insights.
    
  • –  Senior management buy-in is less of an issue, as the value of social listening is clearly seen as important.
    
  • –  The value of social monitoring tools includes stronger relationships with customers, but they also include feedback, ideas for product improvements and development, and finding opportunities.
    
•   Companies are investing more money in marketing technology and, in general, the level of spending on online reputation monitoring software is steadily increasing.
  
•   There is more focus on the importance of social analytics as businesses are increasingly interested in measuring the impact of their social media activity.
  
•   In many cases, having appropriate reputation monitoring software in place would have helped to mitigate the threat of a potential growing online crisis.
  – Companies have plenty of case studies available to them, which illustrate what happens when companies ignore the voice of the customer or do not deal with complaints and issues.
  
•   Many tools are evolving beyond simply monitoring to become business intelligence tools. Listening platforms are able to incorporate different sources of data, which allows companies to reap more value from the tools.
  – Beyond just monitoring, online reputation tools can feed insights into workflows and provide actionable insights that companies can use to improve products or services.
  
•   Consumers increasingly expect businesses to reply to them in real-time, which means being having visibility on the pulse of the customer is essential.
  – The expected time for a response is decreasing, which means customers expect companies to resolve issues and deal with complaints faster.
   This subtle behavioural change means online reputation tools are clearly not going away any time soon.
  
•   The insights from social media are no longer the remit of one department, but rather, there is greater recognition that social media has consequences across all business functions.
  – More companies are employing a multichannel approach, of which social media is an essential part. 
  

Benefits and return on investment from online reputation monitoring

According to Carol Rozzwell and Bill Gassman at Gartner, some of the reasons and benefits of analysing social networks include:

 Reduction in support costs

 Better engagement with customers

 The ability to find influencers outside of the main customer base

 Finding opportunities and detecting threats

 Identify fraud


 Discovering new ideas


 SEO


 To better understand language and behaviour of the customer


 Brand protection


 Identifying bottlenecks and underused expertise


 Identifying and mitigating issues with new product launches


 Managing change


The following represents a list of the most common uses for social media analytics:

•   Competitive intelligence. Online reputation monitoring tools can help you monitor how your competitors are perceived by the market. These programmes can tell you what proactive social marketing efforts your competitors have made.
  You may even want to track the competition’s social media representatives, including keeping an eye on what events they are attending and how often are they tweeting. Following the competition is an easy way to benchmark your social media marketing strategy.
  
  
•   Market reaction. Not only is it important to know how your brand is viewed in your particular market, but also how it is viewed by important outside observers. For example, monitoring your brand name can be a useful source of feedback about a new product launch or re-branding.
  
  
•   Product development support. Social media analytics can help you find all of the uses of your product, good or bad. It can also highlight the features that customers love, hate and use differently from how product managers originally envisioned.
  
• 
    Great customer service. Satisfaction or dissatisfaction is the most common type of sentiment your customers will express about your brand. Social media analytics will not only allow you to find those comments quickly, but to respond instantaneously, helping to stop bad press from spreading farther. If you have a company with a customer service team in place, consider getting a dashboard system that has a workflow option. Having a workflow option will allow your team members to seamlessly share and save notes on particular influences.
  
  
•   Sentiment analysis is a great KPI for brands to track. Is the brand being discussed at all on social media platforms? If so, what are people saying about it? And is it the brand itself being discussed, or is it the product lines? For instance, your customers may not be a fan of Nestlé, but they may love talking Kit Kat on Facebook.
  
   Feedback system for offline marketing performance. Online monitoring can be a good way to gauge the reaction of your latest TV ad. Social buzz is an inexact but useful tool for evaluating how ads are perceived; what clicks, what doesn’t, what unexpected thoughts come up in the comments of people who have viewed or heard about the ads?

Social media monitoring has a number of distinct advantages over traditional research methods:

•   Instantaneous feedback. Unlike alternative market research methods, which rely on the power of focus groups and surveys, social media analytics can paint an instant picture of how consumers view your brand.
  
•   Unbiased. Data from most types of research is structured around the type of questions asked, but social media monitoring allows researchers to glean unstructured data from their respondents, making it possible to learn even the unarticulated demands of a particular market. Using online monitoring tools can help to find what else consumers are interested in.
  
  Used effectively, online reputation monitoring can help a business:
  

•   Improve customer satisfaction and perceptions of brand by creating opportunities to engage with consumers and show that feedback is being listened to.
  
  • –  Gain insights from consumers about what is good and what is bad about products or services.
    
  • –  Gain insights about competitors and their customers’ perceptions about their products and services.
    
    
•   Maintain shareholder value through effective risk management.
  
• 
    Protect business by having ears close to the ground where opinions about a business are being formed and propagated.
  
• 
    Engage in more effective PR by understanding who the real influencers are.
  
  • –  Gain understanding of the online ecosystem in which an organisation is operating.
    
  • –  Understand the echo-chamber relationship between user-generated content and traditional forms of online media, e.g. news, broadcast, trade media.
    
  • –  Aid crisis management and planning.
    
  • –  Provide early warning systems for reactive and defensive PR.
    
    
•   Increase sales by improving the company offering based on what consumers are saying about you.
  
• 
    Reduce marketing spend by learning how to reach out to customers more cheaply. – Find customers in the right place.
  – Target consumers with a better-resonating message.
  
• 
    Reduce internal costs by employing services which save time and effort.
  – Technology can help to trawl through information quickly.
  – Informed and actionable insights can help a business make better decisions.
  
• 
    Help identify gaps for products and services which can be developed for profitable niche markets.
  
• 
    Better SEO will result in more traffic and less need to invest in paid search.
  – Insights into online networks and key phrases found in user-generated content can
  aid attempts to bolster natural search.
  Depending on the approach, social analytics can tell you a lot about your brand and industry. The text-mining algorithm is continuously improving and social media platforms are collecting new types of data. 
  

Social Media Listening #5 - Quest to integrate different types of data

There are now a vast number of tools available which relate either directly or indirectly to social media. These fall into a number of different categories, including reputation monitoring tools, social media management systems, tools to measure influence, web analytics and business intelligence software.

Social media is now a key part of the marketing mix and the insights from related tools must be combined with other types of data to create a holistic, 360-degree view of customers and their experience. Consequently, many reputation tools are evolving so they can either deliver broader insights or plug into other types of business technology. The industry is likely to see consolidation between different technology vendors as businesses reduce the number of point solutions.

Another key trend is that many analytics companies have begun to offer social analytics tools as part of their main web analytics package. In 2011, Adobe announced the launch of SocialAnalytics, a new product within the Adobe Digital Marketing Suite that enables marketers to monitor, measure and monetise social media.

Although some reputation tools are evolving to become business intelligence tools, it is arguable that bigger players such as Adobe and IBM already have a head-start on business intelligence and online measurement. Therefore, social media monitoring vendors may have a long way to catch up, although their technology may have the advantage of being conceived and developed for a more specific requirement.

In the last two years, the industry has seen tremendous M&A activity, with specialists being bought out by larger media companies and multinational retailers, as well as consolidation between different monitoring specialists.

There are plenty of movers and shakers in the reputation monitoring industry and the key to success is to remove the silos between social media measurement, business intelligence and web analytics. The majority of companies are looking for sources of useful information, so whether the insight comes from a reputation monitoring tool or a business intelligence platform is largely irrelevant. 

Social Media Listening #4 - Customer service becomes public through social media

Social media is evolving in response to consumer needs and the rise of the social customer. As the sector is maturing, more companies understand the necessity of responding to complaints and customer issues publicly and quickly.

This step-change has resulted in a shift in consumer expectations. Many customers now expect a public response when they mention a brand on a social network or have an issue or complaint. The absence of a swift response (in real-time if possible) is now seen as an abject ‘fail’ and responding online is increasingly seen as the norm.

Because it is now far easier to give feedback to companies about products and service, there is more accountability for businesses that provide a poor customer experience.

A further consequence of changing expectations is a reduction in the acceptable time span for companies to respond. Consumers expect companies to respond more quickly. A potential pitfall is that a fast response may not always be the right approach, particularly if the issues are complex or involve legal aspects or specific members of staff.

Nevertheless, it is essential that companies are actively monitoring what is being said about their brand online. Customers are far less likely to tolerate being ignored online and quick response can often mitigate the risk of an issue escalating to an online crisis.

As more companies have started to use these tools, they have started to use the insights in a much more personal way. Many companies with a social media presence tend to reply to every customer who mentions the brand online and in general, businesses are getting much better at the follow- up.

In addition, fewer companies are using automated direct messaging and auto-tweets to reply to customer issues, indicating that they are finally getting to grips with best practice. The next step is to ensure companies offer a consistent response across all their marketing channels. Social media channels make the company’s approach to customer service much more visible, but it is worth remembering that social is not a short-term, quick fix.

Social media does not operate in silos and customers will interact with companies across many different channels. Therefore, the quality of the experience needs to be consistent across channels and staff in call centres and retail outlets (where relevant) must be briefed about what is happening online.

Many companies are still fearful of the risk of a social media crisis and fear of reputational damage is still a significant barrier to interacting with social media channels. Another risk comes from disingenuous customers that don’t have real complaints or are simply complaining on social media channels to get something for nothing.

However, companies should remember that online complaints cannot always be resolved. This is where having a social media policy or set of internal guidelines can help. Businesses must brief their staff on the best way to handle complaints online how to resolve a customer dispute, including the action to take if and when the customer is acting unreasonably. An understanding of crisis management is now essential. 

Social Media Listening #3 - Increased investment in online reputation monitoring tools

1. The level of spending in online reputation monitoring tools is steadily increasing, although companies often use a mix of paid-for and free tools.
   Pam McBride, Product Marketing Manager for Sysomos, said:
   “As companies and organisations become more comfortable with social media and begin to appreciate its benefits, we are seeing a greater willingness to spend budgets on monitoring tools.”
   
   An increased focus on research services means that more companies are looking at investing in social listening tools. Businesses are becoming more sophisticated in their approach to social media and there is greater demand for the right tools and techniques, as Warren Sukernek, VP of Social Insights at Alterian, suggests:
   “We’re seeing increased investment in analytics and research services. Customers are becoming more sophisticated and are implementing more comprehensive social intelligence projects. They want to gain more insights and actionable information out of their monitoring activities; they know that there is gold in their mountain of social media data and they want help in discovering it.”
   
   Tim Shier, Managing Director of BrandsEye said:
   “There has been a dramatic increase in overall spend. This is largely a consequence of both the market becoming far better educated in this space but also due to the growth of social networking and the overall impact of digital for brands.”
   
   Beyond simply looking at mentions and discussion of the brand online, companies are interested in understanding who their most influential customers are, and how conversation impacts on conversion and the propensity to purchase. Businesses are also keen to understand how to foster long-term customer loyalty by building stronger relationships with these key influencers. Mark Redgrave, Founder and CEO of OpenAmplify, said:
   “The past 12 months has seen even more clients focus on insight. The growth of social media has created a huge increase in conversation volumes. Costs to monitor those conversations have increased in-line, and the ROI equation is more important than ever. Clients realise that there is literally no point listening if you can’t discover real insights from the data.
   “So clients are rightfully demanding more. They want to go beyond the mention. They want to know what people are actually discussing, how people feel about their products, which brand attributes are front of mind of the consumer, and what actions people are considering. The value is in these actionable insights.” 
   

Social Media Listening #2 - Market Trends

What are the key trends affecting this sector?

•   More companies are beginning to invest in monitoring, measuring and analysing the insights from social media channels.
  – In line with this trend, agencies are coming under pressure to demonstrate the return on investment from related marketing activity.
  
•   It is becoming essential for companies to have a distributed presence on social networks so they can respond quickly to online conversations about their brands, products and services.
  
•   Social media is increasingly used as an online campaign tool to exert pressure on businesses, advertisers, and media organisations.
  – Crisis management and understanding how to deal effectively with negative PR is becoming even more paramount.
  
•   It is essential for companies to have appropriate social media policies in place and provide guidelines for their employees.
  
•   Organisations are increasingly focused on how to glean actionable insights from brand monitoring data, and make appropriate recommendations on actions to take.
  
•   Social media can be used to improve customer service and make customer service professionals more accountable, as customers are more easily able to express opinions online.
  
•   Influence is becoming increasingly significant as a metric for blogs, networks and other forms of content.
  
•   Understanding the value of social media is increasingly important, as more brands are investing in the channel.
  – There is a greater understanding that social media must be tied to objectives, and real business KPIs, rather than arbitrary social media metrics, such as the number of Facebook friends and Twitter followers.
  
•   The marketplace for buzz monitoring technology is becoming saturated with a large number of companies offering many different solutions.
  – There have been a number of acquisitions last year, and consolidation in the industry is expected to continue, particularly as companies are interested in integrating the insight from buzz monitoring solutions with other types of data.
  
•   An increasing number of third-party Twitter app providers are now beginning to charge for additional Twitter insight and data, including Tweetmeme and Twittercounter. Twitterfeed is expected to follow suit with a similar offering.
  
•   The majority of companies are using a combination of free and paid-for buzz monitoring solutions.
  – Free tools have the advantage of creating more awareness about the industry and creating demand for enterprise-level technologies.
  

Social Media Listening #1 - An Introduction

The growth of the market for social listening and buzz monitoring software reflects the increasingly sophisticated approach to social media exhibited by organisations. More companies are beyond the experimental stage with social media and are increasingly focused on optimising their social activity and understanding how insights from social data can feed into improvements for the business.

There is greater understanding of the benefits of social media, which means that getting senior management buy-in is less of an issue. As companies become more comfortable with the suite of tools available to them, they are far more willing to invest in reputation monitoring platforms to garner actionable insights.

There has also been a shift in consumer behaviour, as there is greater expectation that companies will respond publicly on social media websites and in real-time. Therefore, companies can no longer afford to ignore the importance of social listening, which can often mitigate many of the perceived risks of engaging on social networks.

Trends within this market include:
 Increased investment in online reputation monitoring tools 
 Social analytics come into focus as industry matures
 Customer service becomes public through social media
 Quest to integrate different types of data
 Lack of social media governance holds back companies