Choosing a Listening Vendor. Critical Factors

No surprise here, it is all about the data. You need to understand the data sources of the listening platform provider. This is extremely important. Many of the listening providers use the same data sources which include third party aggregators like Boardreader and Spinner.  Know their data sources. 

But a few providers aggregate the data directly from the social media platforms and do their own crawling too. That gives them much more flexibility to conduct deeper analysis, charge less for their product and give you more historical data. They can run more queries against the data, run them more quickly and drill into the data better too. It is always good to know whether your provider is getting the data from the source directly. I'd argue that if the partner is sourcing the vendor directly from the social media advantage, that's better.

2. API Services. Make sure that's an option

More and more of the companies I work with want to integrate social media data into their own marketing and business dashboards. In some cases, we do that for them and provide a holistic dashboard with all their marketing and media metrics. While you may not want to go the dashboard route today, there's a strong likelihood you will in the future. Ask the vendors whether they provide an API data feed so that you can conduct your own analysis on the data, present it with other business metrics and watch it in real time. 

Definitely ask the cost of doing this too. There's no use in them providing an API feed if it is extremely expensive or if they force you to use their dashboard for any meaningful drill downs. If you want to be safe about it, ask to see a few samples of these dashboards or at the very least ask them for the opportunity to speak to a client or two that's integrated their data.

3. Multiple Accounts & Workflow. Look for it

If you're working in a large organization, you know you won't be looking at the data alone. And when it comes to response, no one person is responsible alone for that either. As a result, allowing for multiple accounts and allowing for an internal workflow is becoming increasingly important. Look for that among the listening vendors, you'll appreciate having that in your system. It also creates an electronic paper trail which can be helpful for your legal department further down the road. 

Every vendor allows for multiple accounts now but some still require you to do workflow outside of the tool itself. While that's possible, it is definitely more laborious though it does allow you to manage internal communication in an existing corporate system. Even if you don't need the workflow elements today, you probably will in the near future. Your legal department will probably come knocking on your door asking about it.

Some listening vendors want to stay listening vendors for the rest of their lives. Others see themselves as evolved social media agencies or Social CRM ones offering both a product and a service. A few see themselves as holistic research companies and one or two argue that they're fundamentally technology providers. Nielsen Buzz Metrics just formed a joint venture with McKinsey showing that they're entering the business consulting space. Each listening vendor has its own path to success each with strengths and weaknesses. 

Key is to keep in mind is that your expectations and aspirations align with theirs. Otherwise, you probably won't get the kind of attention you want and won't be considered as strategic a client as you'd like to be thought of. This is also importnat to know as you have the listening vendor partner with your digital marketing agencies. You want to make sure they all play well together.

Probably the most controversial subject in the social media listening space is sentiment analysis. Some experts believe that automated sentiment analysis is a farce saying that it is hard to get more than 50% accuracy which means that a lot of manual analysis is required. Others believe that automated sentiment analysis can get 80% of the way there after which manual sampling and the optimization of the rules is needed to fill the gap. 

It is important to understand how good the different players are at sentiment analysis and make plans to complement the automated efforts. The manual overlay can either be done by you directly or through the vendor itself. When choosing a listening vendor, I've actually recommended that clients consider doing "bake-offs" between the leading listening vendors. It'll give you a feel for who is better for your industry, your brand and the consumers you're trying to listen in on. Some listening vendors do sentiment analysis better for some industries than others.

The social media listening monitoring space is also fracturing based on how textual analysis is done. The ones that do lighter monitoring use keyword analysis primarily to identify words associated with a brand. They use those inferences to draw deeper insights. Others go deeper with linguistic, algorithmic and mathematical analysis along with semantic clustering to determine meaning and opinion too. 

It is worth pointing out that the ones that go deeper than monitoring are also generally more expensive. Most of their buyers are account planners and market research departments versus PR and creative teams focused on campaigns. Sometimes it is hard to rationalize the two types of analytical capabilities and their costs. There is nothing wrong in having two listening platform vendors in your organization serving different needs as you limit the overlap between them and integrate the learnings together. That can be the best solution even though it maybe the most expensive. 

The way most listening vendors are brought into an organization is through one department or one agency that has a very specific mandate. That's all well and good but it sometimes leads to a narrower focus for social media listening than it deserves.

For examples, if you're a large brand you should be doing social listening for these basic needs at the very least. Tracking brand mentions in social media, identifying and nurturing the long tail of influencers in your category, consumer research to drive marketing efforts, search optimization, research for opinions on competitors and new products, optimization of creative assets, customer service, organizational effectiveness, perspectives on product development and something very close to my heart as a measure of overall brand health and as a predictor of sales.

Probably the area (even more so than sentiment analysis) that needs greater improvement in the listening vendor space is geo-location capabilities. This is of no fault to the listening vendors. It is just incredibly hard to identify the location of a specific user in social media. Knowing where that person posted the comment from is not easy. Some platforms are making it easier (for example when I tell Twitter my location) but most don't or certainly don't share it with the listening vendors. In a similar fashion, language capabilities outside of English aren't always the best.

This matters a lot. It is no use knowing how your brand is being perceived if a lot of that perception represents people in locations and of demographics that are not related to where you sell your product or to whom you sell it too. If you're a mass market FMCG with a product that's sold across the country, this is less of an issue. But if you're only selling on the coasts or are only targeting older Moms, this could be an issue. So when you look at vendors keep this in mind and give preference to those vendors that are furthest along in figuring this out.

Some of the vendors that I've worked with or spoken to include Nielsen Buzzmetrics, Visible Technologies, Cymfony, Radian6, Collective Intellect, Scoutlabs, Converseon, Viral Heat, JD Power Umbria and BuzzLogic.