Eric Qualman’s Socialnomics: How social media transforms the way we live and do business made Amazon’s #1 Best Selling List only after three weeks of its mid-2009 publication, and has since then been in the Top 100 Best Selling Business Books List. Produced by Qualman, this 4-something minute video on YouTube elegantly captures the mind-boggling reach of social media. Social media usage and reach statistics are growing so rapidly that the figures in Qualman’s video are probably fairly behind the current picture. Anyway, now rewind a few years: almost concomitant with the rise of social media – social media monitoring was born. The concept was that brands need to have their ear to the ground – listen, engage and influence target populations. Given the size and exponential growth of social media, manual crawling was never really an option. Not surprisingly, technology that married data mining, semantic clustering, NLP et cetera solved the problem, and in came paid-for SaaS options like Scout Labs, Collective Intellect, Buzzlogic, Sentiment Metrics and Visible Technologies, and of course, for very good reasons, the industry favorite – Radian6.
Now let’s shift gears for a minute, and think KM. How many KM research specialists would you need to staff to do the following?
1. Support product development teams with near real-time insights on what features and fixes existing and / or potential customers are discussing online
2. Deliver updates around industry developments and competitor intelligence to key stakeholders in sales and business development
3. Provide account management and delivery teams with germane, just-in-time client insights
Evidently, the above list is a sub-set of what actionable knowledge can be gleaned for business benefits. Social media monitoring for KM enables what I regard as difficult to achieve, yet invaluable, and that is, transcending enterprise silos and delivering value beyond what one can think of as tried and tested KM domains. A few weeks back I started out by configuring some free monitoring tools. You can Google search ‘free social media monitoring free tools’ to find dozens of sites that list out the free options. If you’re new on the monitoring block, it will take you some weeks of trial and error to learn the ropes. I’d recommend you start small, try:
1. Google alerts covers news, web, blogs, video, and groups. You can create up to 1000 alerts and manage the alerts through a an easy-to-use ‘manage your alerts’ section. Be sure to refine what you want to track by using Google’s advanced search capabilities, and if you’re not sure how that works, you can figure it out here.
2. Tweet Scan allows you to receive RSS or e-mail updates when the keyword(s) you’re monitoring appear on Twitter. RSS alerts are free, however, you will need to sign up for e-mail alerts. There’s a 14-day free trial following which you’d need to pay to keep receiving the e-mail alerts; fortunately, the cost is only $20 per year.
3. Backtype searches conversations on blogs and social media sites so you can find out in near-real time what people are discussing about your selected themes
The above three alone, once you’ve done the fine tuning, will get you off to a good start (and good need not be the enemy of perfect). Instead of a team of research analysts, all that you will need is one KM analyst who can sift through the data points to cull the useful nuggets. Regardless of how you choose to proceed: enterprise-scale solution or free tool, the human factor is irreplaceable. Even the most sophisticated and / or expensive monitoring platforms like Radian6 concede to limitations – the good bit is that they’re honest and don’t pretend to have all the answers.
How do you think you can leverage a monitoring solution for enhancing your KM practice? What tools have you tried? Would love to hear your comments.