Reading  Is much of social media monitoring snake oil - or have I missed something? by Richard Stacy that was syndicated in Social Media Today.
Struck me that what he says about Social Media Tool sets being black boxes, may it true, but it might not be the whole story.
"..... when I look at all these impressive reports I can't work out how they help me design and run a social media strategy. They could help me craft a one-to-many message (but that's called advertising not social media) and the sentiment / volume metrics might help in measurement - we did x and the volume / sentiment needle moved x per cent in this direction. "
He goes on to give an example (I added some indentations to make the example easier to follow):
....  Suppose there was a large room and inside it were all the key stakeholders of your organisation. Let's say these people were at a drinks reception that you had organised - gathered around in groups chatting about you, subjects relevant to what you/ they do or maybe just about sport and the weather.
As hosts of this party what do you do?
The logical thing would be to go into the room circulate around the groups, listen to what people are saying, have a chat, tell people what you were doing. What you wouldn't do is send someone else in to listen-in on the conversations or set up a form of remote surveillance and then sit in another room and wait for someone to prepare a presentation and report back.
It may well be that this report is very detailed and gives you more information than you could obtain just by circulating round the room.
It would tell you exactly what topics were being discussed, what volume and sentiment of conversation was attached to each, who was speaking the most, correlate the people with the most to say with the colour of their shoes, determine that those with black socks are marginally more positive about you than those with brown socks - or any other way you would want to "mine the conversation".
But exactly how useful would this information be? If all you were going to do was to walk into the room, stand on a platform and deliver a speech, this type of stuff might help.
You could, for example drop in a subtle reference to the fashion credentials of black footwear. But that's advertising. That's good old-fashioned one-to many communication. Its not social media."
The paradox here, is that the Social Media Monitoring and Buzz tools that are evolving to monitor Social Media might not be much good in helping you "do" Social Media.
True, the Social CRM capabilities coming on line lately should go some of the way address this concern, and Radian6 does have the Social Graph built in, for every influential it finds in a Topic Profile; Workflow is also built in, as well as a way to flag information, assign it and follow up.
But what about Social Media  Strategy - do any of these tools help?
Probably not that much.
But then, the same argument could be made for Web Analytics Tools, or for that matter, Network Analysis tools like the old HP Openview I used work with back in the day.
You could even take it further and say that Medical Diagnostic tools that find out if your sick, or have disease, aren't going to tell you anything about how to stay healthy - should they?
And that's a good question - should a Social Media Monitoring platform, as Richard Stacy points out, a "black box", Â tell you how to do Social Media?
I think you need to know what your looking for, first, same as with the Web Analytics tools and Medical Diagnostics - the strategy might be something you start with - Social Media measurement platforms probably can't, at this stage, supply much that can help the actual marketing and strategy, at least, not yet.
Link to original post