Social Media Insights

Nowadays one of the most discussed areas of insights for marketers is social media. It looks like everything has something to say about the best way to use them as marketing tool, either for companies to interact with customers or as source of insights to understand the customers in a best way.

Every time there are new companies or gurus that appear saying they have the key to understand how to get the most from the social media for marketing.  They offer new ways to measure the digital world and help the brand agencies to maximize the value of their social marketing programs. That is the case of Buddy Media, who recently announced a strategic partnership with eight of the world’s top ten global advertisers to help them to optimize their social communications on their own media and also quantify the impact of the earned media using meaningful metrics. They propose as meaningful social media metrics the reach / frequency, demographics, online behavior and benchmarking of competitive brands in the social landscape. (Computer Weekly News via VerticalNews.com, 2011)

The reality is that the social media is an emerging phenomenon, which is still in evolution and has not been completely established, there are a high variety of social networks available for different purpose and some of them do not last long time and others are appearing. The ones that have survived the most time are constantly adding new features and are still developing the business model.

Additional to the evolution of the social media tools that are available there is one more factor that is important to consider, the way the people is using these tools. The fact that the user is not required to proof his / her identity has made possible for people to create alternative life on the web and the information it cannot be as reliable as the experts may think.

Under this scenario it is not very likely that the information generated is a fully reliable source of customer insights.