Over the past 18 months I’ve had the opportunity to work with a number of social media monitoring tools for a variety of clients and research purposes.

From day one I’ve been of the opinion that social media monitoring is not just for brand management or marketing – last year during Social Media Tools Week I argued this point. Unfortunately though this is where most vendors in this space remain focused. I will continue to believe that social media monitoring has enterprise wide application with the insights and social conversations being an opportunity to tap into the real thinking of customers, prospects, markets etc.

I have two general concerns though with respect to social media monitoring:

1. How to make this scalable and sustainable
2. How to ensure what you’re hearing represents a statistically relevant and balanced view.

Making this scalable and sustainable

As you start using social media monitoring strategically (i.e. watching more than just your brand) the volume of data you need to manage increases dramatically. For many of the monitoring products on the market, this means you simply create yet another silo of data that is disconnected from the core business goal of being able to take action.

A bit has been written in the past about the number of clowns flooding into the social media space basically conning companies into spending money to build a social media profile. This article last year from BusinessWeek and a follow on post from Olivier Blanchard touch on some of these issues.

Here in Australia I’ve seen these types of people and organisations popping up around the web – in many cases offering low cost programs that involve nothing more than setting up a Twitter account and Facebook page. And unfortunately it’s not just limited to social media – I see the same happening in the digital marketing and online reputation management space.

I saw evidence of this first hand last week with a new client. They had engaged a Sydney company to build a ‘social brand’ for them. The end result was beyond ordinary - it was wrong on so many fronts. The biggest issue however wasn’t the shoddy work. They had made 3 or 4 grave mistakes that someone in their position, with their experience shouldn’t be making.

Mistake #1 - Strategy

There wasn’t any.

Ford, and specifically Scott Monty have been getting a lot of attention for their social media efforts – winning widespread business praise and recognition – Two examples are here and here.

Quite rightly I hear you say. They’ve done a good job promoting their brand, building awareness, running some interesting campaigns…

In some respects I agree. I really like aspects of their approach – for example The Ford Story, but I can’t help feel that something is missing. Has Ford used social media to align the whole experience life cycle?

If we look at the experience life cycle for someone owning a car, it might represent the following major milestones:

1. Brand association/affinity
2. The purchase experience
3. The usage experience
4. The repurchase experience

Looking at these experience milestones, I’d argue that Ford is doing really well working 1 and 4 – but what about 2 and 3. Would you look at this and say they’ve done a brilliant job of using social media to manage the buyers experience with their company and products? Are they really superstars, leading the way with innovative use of social media?

Earlier this year I posted about being approached by a global conference organiser to sponsor a social media event – I declined because the event was decidedly unsocial.

Given we’ve recently been swamped with SxSW noise and enthusiasm, this led me to recall a couple of posts I stored away about events

1. How to use social media in order to deliver more effective, engaging events.
2. Five reasons why your business conference sucks.

Looking at these two posts now and in light of my comments about the unsocial social media conference, I’ve created a check list that utilises content from each of these posts and summarises what I think constitutes an event that embraces social media.

These points are the first version of a framework that I’m going to build out that will outline how to plan and execute a business event that properly leverage’s social technologies and the community.

I’ve grouped these key points into the 3 lives of an event – before, during, and after.

Last year I wrote a blog post outlining my concerns about the behaviour of some consumers and how they tend to use social media to unleash hell on a company, only to walk away from attempts to resolve a situation.

I wrote that post because I was seeing a lot of ‘thought leaders’ talking about how companies need to start taking responsibility for their products and actions and embracing the consumer’s desire and power to deliver feedback. So whilst on the one hand the expectations of how a company would embrace or engage went through the roof, I wasn’t seeing any corresponding change in expectations of consumer behaviour or responsibility.

This whole lack of mutual responsibility really worried me then, and it still worries me today.

Two things happened in the past week to make me revisit this issue.

Firstly, I caught a Tweet whereby a user raised the spectre of patent theft against a company that we have some business dealings with. Attempts to communicate with this person so as to clarify the reason for this tweet failed. Wow, accusations of patent violation are no small matter – so was this a legitimate issue or a case of social industrial espionage?

One question I'm always asked is how to explain what social media strategy and participation looks like so senior executives can (at least) contextualise what this all means.

A simple approach that I've found has worked in the past is to take an actual business or (even better) an incident or event in the Australian business market and then retrospectively examine how social media might have helped manage a situation or led to a different outcome. Hindsight is a wonderful thing.

One such situation has been playing out over the past few months and relates to a Australian Federal Government scheme to insulate homes. The scheme ran into issues as unscrupulous contractors flooded into the market installing foil insulation without proper training or safety measures. The issue has blown up because people are dying, houses are burning down, and thousands of homes are now unsafe.

Enter Master Electricians

A leading industry body, Master Electricians was the first to raise the alarm and has been in the mainstream media trying to draw attention to the very serious problems of laying foil insulation over wiring and using metal tacks to hold it in place (amongst other issues).