Comments on: Dear Social Media Monitoring Companies…

By: mike manuel

mike manuel — Tue, 05 May 2009 04:30:03 +0000

no argument here, brian, the later (triage, process, etc.), that’s where i’m investing my energy and time these days. as i see it, monitoring and response work it’s really less of a tech problem now, and more of a workflow/adaptation challenge. where i keep going sideways with the big brand monitoring firms is the ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to this problem…

By: Brian Ellefritz

Brian Ellefritz — Mon, 04 May 2009 19:46:47 +0000

Mike seems to have a good perspective on this. As a social media practitioner on the client side (Cisco) I can affirm that even within a single company there is a wide spectrum of readiness for different response strategies. Some are way back at listening and risk management and dashboards are reasonable to them; others are well along on response and outreach management strategies and could use alerts, routing or better simple tools. Still the most robust tools seem to have a lot more utility than we can take advantage of as we sort through organization and role conversations for this new responsibility.

I think the tools vendors are poorly suited to counsel clients on PROCESS, ROLES, etc. just for scalability reasons. Seems to me like that’s an agency opportunity. My 2 cents.

By: mike manuel

mike manuel — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 00:12:11 +0000

always happy to talk, mike; your team at visible and the guys at radian6 have always shown you’re adept at using your own technology and tools for listening and poking back at the marketplace when it speaks up. if nothing else, it shows you understand the challenges companies face — case in point, you not only found this post, but knowing timelines is of the essence, you left this comment on a sunday. dave alston at radian6 reached out yesterday on email. both efforts are impressive.

By: Mike Spataro

Mike Spataro — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 23:18:09 +0000

I’d like to discuss this with you and get your front-line feedback from your customers. Obviously, in an emerging market like this it’s always going to be a work in progress to figure out how to deploy any platform that meets the various workflow and response needs of all different types of businesses and internal groups. This is an area where I spend about 85% of my time with clients nowadays so I’d welcome the chance to explore this more with you (and Tom). There are some very fundamental differences in how brands approach this area and the differences are very unique depending on which part of an organization you are trying to help, especially at an enterprise level. You are dead-on though that this has much more to do with laying the groundwork for a successful plan and approach than it does with any tool and technology, which is why we have established a specialty in this area that is independent of the application. I’d welcome the opportunity to exchange war stories with you on this at any time.

By: mike manuel

mike manuel — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 15:52:02 +0000

yeah, the challenge, as you know, is just that response work is half technology/half workflow. it feels sometimes like everyone’s trying to throw more technology at the problem, when the workflow half has yet to be really figured out.

By: Tom Biro

Tom Biro — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 03:17:21 +0000

Are companies REALLY surprised about this? As someone who’s now evaluated these packages at two spots, and gone through the rigamarole (sp?) with people all over the place, with different experience, different opinions, and so on, I wholeheartedly agree and am shocked to hear that a vendor might not “get” that just yet.