Went along to #MSM09 today; a new conference which bought together some of the leading people in the social media monitoring field. The presentations were each insightful in their own ways and many of them can be found over at slideshare. Do check them out.
I particularly enjoyed listening to a practical example of how social media monitoring could help deal with a major online brand crisis from Robin Grant, who’s the MD at WeAreSocial. I’d like to explore how his model could be applied to my Higher Education clients sometime this winter.
Some of my thoughts from / about the conference:
- As I have long suspected, the idea of applying old media frameworks and mechanisms to new online channels is pointless; things like response planning / embargoes / NDAs are pointless and ‘of another world’.
- I probably wouldn’t pay for a social media monitoring tool right now, but I would invest in building something like Robin Grant displayed which was a dashboard that ran off free tools (I believe the main component was netvibes).
- For Social Media Monitoring to develop it needs some universal standards adopting; this could be driven through a recognised qualification in the subject (akin to the GAIQ) and/or through the entry to the sphere of a major player (probably the big G)
- Having a live twitterstream for feedback enhances the experience, although personally I have grown to hate the banality of people tweeting abridged comments from other people’s talks – its a bit self congratulatory / wanky.
- No one mentioned Facebook Insights – something I’m using more and more for my social media clients. Facebook was written off as a closed book you can’t get data from – I don’t think this is true.
- Digital teams musn’t forget that part of their job is still to educate people internally – not just sit in a silo and moan about a lack of investment in what they think is cool.
For such an emerging and exciting industry I think a half yearly conference would probably be necessary – a lot can happen in a year as discussed in many sessions today.
Finally – thanks to Our Social Times for organising – much appreciated – MSM09 was definitely a worthwhile break from my normal workload.
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Thanks for the write up. Glad you found MSM09 useful. We will be running it again next year (not sure about 6 months though – we’ll see). In the meantime the discussion will continue in our LinkedIn Group: Monitoring Social Media.
[…] Crises of this nature are not new to us here at We Are Social, and in fact we helped Skype successfully deal with a comparable crisis , having put in place a real-time social media listening and responding programme and crisis plan when we started working with in June last year. When the crisis kicked off in October ‘08, the listening and responding process was working like a well oiled machine and the crisis plan we had in plan worked well. We tracked all of the online conversations relating to the crisis, helping Skype’s President write a series of blog posts in response and getting the word out to everyone who had written about the crisis with Skype’s side of the story. Here’s the case study presentation I gave about this at Monitoring Social Media ‘09: […]