Latest Gartner Report on Social Media

I have been away from the blog for a bit, but jumping back in with a pile of thoughts and content in the coming weeks. One of the more interesting reports that I recently read and digested was from Andrew Frank at Gartner. The report was entitled “Social Media Delivers Marketing Intelligence” and is a built on the framework he introduced in his piece about “Charting the the Social Media Marketing Landscape” which identified “social media monitoring and analytic services” as a key component in responding to the marketing imperatives of social media.

Andrew presents a view on how media companies and brand marketers can approach the topic and assess the vendor landscape and why Social media monitoring and analysis is a complex field, serving many constituencies and objectives. Visible Technologies is mentioned as vendor in the research. Some of Andrew’s key findings and recommendations are listed below but I would encourage agencies and marketers to have a look at the complete report as Andrew and the team at Gartner continue to expand their in-depth knowledge and coverage of the space. Watch out Forrester.

Key Findings:

• Social media monitoring is gradually achieving the status of a requirement among leading media marketing organizations.
• Although they contain similar core elements, social media monitoring solutions offer a wide variety of approaches to interpreting social media-derived data and supporting it with actionable workflow.
• A large share of the difficulty that social media sites have had in effectively monetizing their traffic is related to the inadequacies of current measurement regimes, which hampers attempts at marketing in social environments.
• Brand advertisers face a key challenge in matching the pace of social media reaction and opinion propagation with traditional campaign development cycles.

Recommendations:

• Agencies must embrace social media analytics as a baseline business requirement integrated into all customer offerings.
• Media companies investing in content development have a particularly strong need to understand and predict consumer trends through mining of social media, and must build core disciplines accordingly.
• IT organizations supporting new media marketing initiatives should prioritize adoption of social media monitoring practices and related metrics platforms.

13 pages of analysis await those who download the report. Nicely done Andrew.

Blake Cahill

Visible Technologies