Monitoring vs Analytics [Infographic]
Paul Dunay is an award-winning B2B marketing expert with more than 20 years’ success in generating demand and creating awareness for leading technology, consumer products, financial services and professional services organizations.
Paul is the global vice president of marketing for Maxymiser a leading web optimization firm, and author of four “Dummies” books: Facebook Marketing for Dummies (Wiley 2009), Social Media and the Contact Center for Dummies (Wiley Custom Publishing 2010), Facebook Advertising for Dummies (Wiley 2010) and Facebook Marketing for Dummies 2nd Edition (Wiley 2011).
His unique approach to marketing has led to recognition of Paul as a BtoB Magazine Top 25 B2B Marketer of the Year for 2010 and 2009 and winner of the DemandGen Award for Utilizing Marketing Automation to Fuel Corporate Growth in 2008. He is also a finalist for the last six years in a row in the Marketing Excellence Awards competition of the Information Technology Services Marketing Association (ITSMA), and is a 2010 and 2005 gold award winner in Driving Demand.
Buzz Marketing for Technology, Paul’s blog, has been recognized as a Top 20 Marketing Blog for 2009 and 2008, a Top Blog to Watch for 2009 and 2008, and an Advertising Age Power 150 blog in the “Daily Ranking of Marketing Blogs.”
Paul has shared his marketing thought leadership as a featured speaker for the American Marketing Association, BtoB Magazine, CMO Club, MarketingProfs, Marketing Sherpa, Marketing Executives Networking Group (MENG), and ITSMA. He has appeared on Fox News, and his articles have been featured in BusinessWeek, The New York Times, BtoB Magazine, MarketingProfs and MarketingSherpa.
Paul holds an Executive Certificate in Strategy and Innovation from MIT’s Sloan School of Management and a bachelor’s degree in Marketing and Computer Science from Ithaca College.
Paul:
Thank you for your thoughtful analysis of our industry, particularly concerning the value of “social insights” vs strictly monitoring. In fact, the basis of the ConsumerSphere business model: “strategic social solutions” reflects our complete agreement with your assessment.
Patrick Furey
President
ConsumerSphere
WHEW! thanks Patrick I was trying to share all the great knowledge I gained this month but yet be fair to everyone I spoke to – thanks for commenting
Awesome post Paul!
To add – couple of the overlooked areas of SM analytics:
– Categorizing and prioritization based on ‘influence’
– Competitive benchmarking (same category of product and services)
@Anol – good catch thank for the comment!
You couldn’t review all of the hundreds of offerings? 🙂
One more to consider is my company Conversition Strategies which has a business offering called EvoListen. This is a market research product that applies scientific marketing research principles to the analysis of social media data. It was build by researchers so it includes thousands of variables relevant to market researchers.
@LoveStats
@Annie – I am aware of you guys from my book partner Rich Krueger who pointed me to your website. its true there are tons of these firms out there its impossible to interview them all – it would be a full time job 😉
Great article Paul, thanks. It truly is a growing and confusing space. I thought you might also enjoy an article our CMO wrote on this topic Brand Monitoring is not research http://humanvoice.wordpress.com/2010/03/03/brand-monitoring-is-not-research/.
Cheers
David
PS: http://www.forrester.com/rb/Research/motivequest_delivers_strategy-led_brand_monitoring_services/q/id/40173/t/2
Ok thanks David – its really hard to cover everyone in such a post – but thank you for bringing MotiveQuest to my attention
A great round up Paul and I like the infographic. Of course, IMHO, it could have been even more “awesomer” if it had included Trackur.com. 😉
@Andy – as soon as I saw your comment I knew I forgot Trackur! Sorry about that Andy – next time I promise
Having worked with some of this platforms, I’ve appreciated your even-handed post.
I’d add that some of them are someway lacking the ability to analyze not English conversations, though I understand this is a major issue especially for non-US firms.
Cheers
Alfredo
Great point Alfredo – that was not one of my concerns but very few of them have multi language capability – which if you work for a global firm can quickly become an issue
FYI- ConsumerSphere technology is able to monitor in all the major languages as well as provide translation capabilities
Patrick Furey
President
ConsumerSphere
Thanks Patrick – what languages are you able to do?
Thanks Paul. I am curious how you see social media analytics/listening/monitoring in the context of the larger “customer experience management/analytics” space? The structured and mostly unstructured data that comes from the social networks is but one of many data points involving “the customer”. The holy grail seems to be making the unstructured data coming from social networks, IVR, etc actionable at a dashboard level. Curious how you are looking at this issue at your company.
Henry
@hebruce
Paul- excellent read, could you follow up with your views on the integration between monitoring and analytics in terms of sources and tools (possibly even vertical specific)
Hi Paul,
The landscape for social media monitoring and analytics is changing before our eyes and has been a challenge to grasp. You have done an outstanding job pulling together a large amount of information and adding your expertise. A truly awesome effort. Thank you!
Cheryl Burgess
@ckburgess
@Cheryl – thank you so much – its comments like yours that make it all worthwhile!
@Kamal – ok I will start thinking about that – I might need to do some research on it!
@Henry – well its clear that those two spaces need to come together – no product I tested had this “built in” at least not yet – Radian6 did have some Salesforce integration but thats about it. While at Avaya I helped to develop an integration with Radian6 and the Contact Center. This will become the norm for major brands over the next year or two.
I found a site yesteday which appeared a lot such as this, are you positive an individual seriously isn’t replicating this website?
That’s my business site!
if only every synopsis could be as comprehensive, informative and consolidated as this, i would certainly have more hours to read some great fiction!!!
of special note, was the “social crm meets systems integration” capability…having social media as a data feed into a campaign management/lead nurturing software solution in addition to email, direct mail, web site, call center and mobile feeds, provides the ultimate in channel optimization and ultimately roi…
@Debra – I cant make that up – it came right from the vendor 😉
Paul – Nice post. I’m curious to see if you looked at Spredfast. We would fall in your “analytic aggregator” category. It would be great to get your take.
@Kenneth – YES I did look at Spredfast and in fact I LOVED it – but you guys do so much more than the “aggregators” that I profiled – they are mostly dashboards of social data and reporting where as you guys aggregate the Twitter, Facebook comments of the people within the company – all around the Boolean search(s) that you are running on your system. Much more functionality than anyone that I profiled – but I guess that’s a good thing!
Paul: Thanks for the helpful analysis.
@MargaretMolloy
Paul – Awesome piece of work. Thank you for taking the time and effort to present this overview. We are working on the SMB Avaya social campaign and your work in the space has been an inspiration. The only drawback I see is that you have opened up a big can of worms. Every vendor on the planet is now going to drop you a line and say “what about me.” 🙂 Just ask @jowyang about his list of social strategists! I hope the pain is well worth the effort. Congrats and looking forward to your continued work.
Cheers – @socmedia365
Thanks Richard – totally agree there are so many vendors out there I could make this blog post a full time just just tracking all of them!
@Paul Dunay – i was just wondering if you can help me with some information regarding Sysomos and Crimson Hexagon. I am researching both platforms wondering which one would be a better option for our company. So if you could provide me with some insights on both Platforms that would be great. Thanks