trendpreneur

So, yesterday’s Monitoring Social Media conference is over, and all I have to show for it is a heightened case of RSI (ok, ok, I jest). My live notes from the talk are here – Alice, you were an inspiration, I just had to call up mental images of your GDC typing-at-the-speed-of-light – how could I not publish the notes I was already taking? All that training at videogame events has certainly paid off.

But now it’s time to reflect and put together some marginally more coherent thoughts on social media and the lessons of the day.

Lesson One. Social media is people.

We’re finally starting to get it. Social media isn’t about numbers, or spreadsheets, or models, or calculating ROI to the last tenth of a decimal point. It’s about people, and you can’t (always) chain people down in tidy little tickyboxes and assign numbers to them.

We are not numbers.

This causes conflict in organisations that are used to the ‘old’ ways of doing things and don’t really understand the ‘new’. The case for the new was presented again and again and again yesterday. Look. We get it. Social media  matters. People matter. It’s just difficult convincing higher-ups that it’ll impact the bottom line.

There were a few attempts to get some slightly more detailed answers on this subject. What exactly is the investment, when we talk ROI? Is it the cost of a tool? The cost of an agency? The cost of people? What will make the higher-ups listen? In the case of STA Travel, it was pointing out the properties of existing customers (that the STA relationship stopped once customers had booked a trip) and making a clear, coherent case for engagement to extend that relationship. But this brings me on to…

Lesson Two. Everyone is different.

We’re all human, and so naturally we want easy answers. But there are none. It seems that currently the range of social media monitoring tools (in terms of software offerings) is very much an off-the-shelf jobbie – obviously customisable to some extent within that, but still, off-the-shelf. Indeed, some companies with freemium/SaaS products seem to be encouraging this approach.

But if I learned nothing yesterday, it’s that everyone’s totally different, and that works for one client won’t work at all for another. Enter agencies, and humans (see point 3), and customisation, and tailoring. Hell, the agency behind Skype built a dashboard because nothing out there fit their needs! Weren’t all the SMM providers in the audience cringing at that? Speakers repeatedly said that today’s tools aren’t really that great – but some speakers praised them! What a load of mixed messages.

There is method to this madness, though, and it’s all about the human. People praising the tools probably used them well for their specific needs – people dissin’ them probably found that they were looking for something that the tools didn’t do. One thing seems sure though, the tools should work for the clients, rather than the 37signals-etc approach of ‘fit your thinking into the way the tool does it’.

Lesson 3. Automatic isn’t good enough.

This is obviously something I’m interested in, but it was almost disheartening to hear it repeated so much.

Basically, we need humans. We’ll always need humans. Tools help us cut down the humans’ time involvement, but there seems this fundamental mistrust – sentiment is wrong too much and too often, and even humans disagree 15% of the time (bang in line with the kappas I’ve seen in academia).

So even if there were a brilliant, perfect, 100% reliable sentiment detection system, it would be wrong 15% of the time, and so humans would want to check every message just in case. And if all you want is a ‘temperature’ type analysis, well, free tools already do that, and even allowing for error they’re just about good enough.

Lovely.

Lesson 4. We’re too close to the curve to see what’s around the corner.

The whole social media landscape is changing, and the monitoring stuff is just starting to catch up. Two years ago it was rubbish, nowadays it’s OK, and in two years it’ll be great. But the future’s not about technology, it’s about business intelligence, business process, and getting companies to embrace social media and its feedback loops at every level.

Because this is going to become such a fundamental part of how we do business, major players are already getting in the act. Search engines are integrating realtime search, so ’social’ SEO – building social capital – will become as important as keyword-based SEO. But you can’t just add in ’social keywords’ – that concept simply does not transfer.

As well as that, Google and Twitter could well be (hell, let’s just say it, they are already) developing their own social media monitoring systems. Google Analytics is powerful, but not in a social way – but it could be. Twitter could launch their own monitoring product and charge us for API use, creating an.. interesting, albeit unlikely, situation. Sure, cross-platform will still be a need, but we’ve already seen that that need varies so much even by department within a company!

One of the more interesting concepts to come up yesterday was that of an open source framework for monitoring social media, a plug and play approach that everyone could be using in two years – with a company making money where the hard stuff is, consulting and the human factor. I do wonder if this is perhaps viable, especially adding in outsourced human validation (MTurk) and cross-classification to reduce error.

Anyway, this is certainly all food for thought, and <shameless plug>should give me plenty to talk about at the RealTime ChristmasCrunch, at least!</plug>

I just read an interesting article on the RT wires about why Twitter’s the future of search. A statement that initially got a nod of the head, until I started thinking in a little more detail about the arguments. I think it’s really important here to actually talk a bit about what search is.

@Gyutae’s article seems to simply equate search with ‘finding information’, but there’s a slightly deeper dimension: you want to get all the information, or the most relevant information, or unbiased information, or…

Anyway, it’s not just about finding stuff, but about the quality and source of the stuff you find.

So, six reasons why Twitter isn’t the future of search:

Social isn’t representative

Asking Twitter for an opinion is all very well, but bear in mind you are getting the Twitterverse’s opinion, not everyone. Although Twitter is becoming more ‘mainstream’, you’re still looking at a certain type of user, in a somewhat self-selecting crowd.

If you’re after the best restaurants in New York, you’re likely to get a decent cross-section of Twitter replying, but if I’m looking for recommendations for a nail salon in Birmingham and nobody’s mentioned one on Twitter, I have to poll my own network. Which is great, if I have access to the sorts of people who would know. Otherwise I have to seek out a few likely people and @ them the question, wait for replies (if any), etc. A lot of work.

In short: Search queries that don’t match the Twitter userbase don’t get good answers.

Anti-information overload isn’t always informative

Sometimes you’re simply not searching for something that can be answered in 140 characters. Sure, Twitter encourages people to be concise with their information, but if I’m after a fairly detailed explanation of something – or a howto, or a tutorial – I won’t find that on Twitter. If someone’s tweeted a link with the appropriate text, I might find it, but Twitter just isn’t the platform to search for detail on.

Realtime makes overviews hard to find

Realtime search is great for realtime applications, such as finding out the exact response to an ad that just ran during the Super Bowl, or the latest football score. But if you want historical information as well as ‘the latest’, or an overview of an event rather than the blow-by-blow tweets, you get totally overloaded.

For example, digging through #sxsw tweets to find informative nuggets was just a nightmare. Realtime search definitely has its place, but it won’t ever be the only way we search.

It’s hard to pick out accuracy from the masses

This ties in a little with #1, in that ‘the masses’ is actually ‘the masses who use Twitter’. A level playing field is great, but the advantage of something like PageRank is that you do gain an idea of how respected, influential, popular, accurate, etc. a web page is — generally people linking to it are giving it a silent ‘thumbs up’, pushing its PageRank higher.

That’s just not there on Twitter, and for various search tasks, you actually want that sort of ranking and relevance, rather than just a mass of voices all shouting at once.

Direct contact with sources isn’t always the answer

If you had a question about what it’s like to be a comic, sending Stephen Fry an @ might get you a nice 140-character answer. But if you were doing biographical research, or wanted to ask any sort of question requiring a detailed answer, or actually have an in-depth conversation, you wouldn’t use Twitter search.

Leaving aside the fact that some Twitter celebrity accounts have been known to be fake, how much value from asking someone directly can you really get, compared to reading published information about them?

On the flipside, if you have a question that suits a very specific person – maybe not a celebrity, but how about an entrepreneurial mum from Wisconsin? – you can find that person from Twitter, whereas you’d be lost on a more conventional search engine (until you find WorkAtHomeMomsFromWisconsin.com, of course).

I’m not saying that this level of trust and source interaction is bad, but it’s not ‘the future of search’.

Location awareness is unreliable

Using just the location associated with a tweet and saying ‘every piece of content from this location is related to it’ is just plain silly. A lot of Twitter conversation is location-free, and the only real application of this is to resolve statements like ‘Back from Starbucks. Wow, what nice service!’ to mean ‘Starbucks in Edinburgh has nice service’ because Twitter knows I’m in Edinburgh. A lot of statements posted from a location talk about other locations, even.

Having some form of location-knowledge about a person is great, but it’s got to overcome some serious hurdles before it can accurately be used in search. However, it does make finding the aforementioned work at home mother easier, and location definitely is part of the future of the Web.

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