Social Media Analytics — What’s in Your Wallet?

It’s been a big week for social media professional development at Strategic Communications Group. On Monday we had Kelly Collis of CityShopGirl come in, and this Wednesday Patrick Lafferty, long-time CMO for the Travel Channel visited the agency.

Check out my partner Marc Hausman’s excellent blog The Strategic Guy for more on Pat’s talk. Pat focused on the elements of social media the Travel Channel deployed, including the most successful branded app campaign ever launched on Facebook, called Kidnap.  I asked him what tools he used to track the effectiveness of these socmed campaigns.

“You know, I’m not sure. That was the agency’s job,” was his response. Ah, those were the days. I remember being the client, and letting the agency sweat the analytic details. But for the past six years, I’ve been the agency and good reporting is always a topic with clients. Luckily, Pat followed up with an email to me with some of the analytic tools his agency employed to keep him well informed.

I’ve listed them below, with links and a snippet of description from their sites. As you can see, the space is getting crowded fast:

• Radian6 — “a complete platform to listen, measure and engage with your customers across the entire social web.”
• Sysomos — “brings business intelligence to social media, providing instant and unlimited access to all social media conversations”
• Crimson Hexagon — “opinion analysis platform enabling companies to distill meaning and derive actionable insights from online opinion”
• Meteor — “measure, manage and monetize your earned media”

I have heard about a couple of these before, but haven’t done a deep dive since the tools we use for clients have been sufficient to date. Here are some of them:

• MyMediaInfo — my agency switched over to this tool from a competitor in the spring, and in addition to being a strong PR database it offers good social media monitoring
• Social Oomph (formerly TweetLater) — right now I use mainly for Twitter keyword alerts, better click analytics than bit.ly and identification of socmed power users
• Social Mention — pretty straight-forward, get a ping every time you or a client is mentioned
• WordPress — very powerful and flexible platform, clients use both the .com and the .org hosted version. For analytics the cloud .com version offers very good Google based analytics, and also additional Quantcast numbers I’ve been exploring lately. The hosted version offers a number of tracking plugins – we use Wassup and StatPress for multiple clients

Of course social media isn’t all about tools, it’s about behavior online. And there are no right/wrong answers here, since the socmed analytics market is rapidly growing and evolving. But if you’re running socmed activities for business purposes, the benefits have to be quantified – or the project won’t continue to be funded.

Example of Social Media Analytics Dashboard from SAS

Fellow PR and Marketing professionals — care to help out here? What have you used, and what socmed analytic tools do you recommend? Let me know via comment or email, and let’s spread the knowledge.

But first — let’s all have a relaxing Labor Day weekend!