http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-stats-dashboard/screenshots/

Quite frankly there are lots of tools out there that will do this for you. Which makes me think that this post should have been called, “how an agency can monitor social media networks for free”. Sure it’s a little bit more wordy, but at least it’s explicit.

You hit the nail on the head when you say businesses want to know how “determine how to quantify buzz” but all you do is “determine the quantity of the buzz” and that’s pretty useless to a brand manager or someone that wants to action social media data.

Therefore, as usual, I’d begin at the other end of this Social Media stuff. Start with the client and find out what is important to them.

For example, a company that has just completed internal research about its customers views on a particular issue, for example “Does customer think we are green”, and finds that customers are happy with the companies green credentials, does not need to see dialogue about a few chaps saying they are not happy with company X’s stance on green. Actually if you go and show then data on this issue and they reply via the web it might actually do more harm than good.

A challenge of Social Media is not monitoring the data, but making that data relevant and actionable to the business that’s requesting the service. And quite frankly most Social Media services don’t go anywhere near that because a) they don’t build a deep and meaningful relationship with their customers and b) they don’t have acccess to the departments which could benefit from that degree of insights, c) they linger on free.

Look forward to the next installment :)