Mining and Monitoring the Conversation Gap

If a “Conversation Gap” exists for your brand (be it a real gap or a perceived one) the next logical question for most PR and marketing folks is to ask “what are people saying?” -- and herein lies a burgeoning, multi-million dollar industry, chalk-full of companies each promising tools and services that mine and monitor online conversations to help you answer this single question.

If you're thinking about this right now, here's my advice: be very careful and clear about what your goals are at this point in the game before you start entertaining proposals and signing contracts.  There's a difference between mining the conversation gap and monitoring it.

Mining the Conversation Gap
Mining typically involves looking at a large volume of discussion (usually over a span of time) and from that extracting patterns and themes that lend themselves to some fairly decent insights and analysis of discussion trends.  The companies that do mining really well basically look and act a lot like search engines with huge indexes of data (e.g., from blogs, forums, groups, etc.) that are regularly queried based on a pre-defined set of terms or keywords that you, the client, want to track.  Mining is great for keeping tabs on big picture trends and sentiment shifts, but it's lousy at capturing real-time issues as they typically bubble up online -- which is critical for communicators trying to stay in front of things.

Monitoring the Conversation Gap
Monitoring involves being on the front line of online discussion -- as it's happening.  Monitoring is hard work and more often than not, the companies that do it well are relying less on machines and automation, and more on human analysis and teams of researchers.  These services typically cull all sorts of online content (every day) and flag discussions, links, etc. that fit within a pre-defined scope of work.  While monitoring services are great for staying on top of online chatter and keeping the pulse of communities, monitoring doesn't scale very easily and aside from front line observations and anecdotal knowledge, it's really tough to gauge what sort of impact these discussions are having on overall brand perception (and whether or not you're actually closing the conversation gap).

All this having been said, the perfect answer to this situation is that you need a combination of both mining and monitoring to really understand what people are saying.  And the sad reality is that a service that meets these unique needs doesn't exist -- today.

So for now, if you're thinking about listening to the online conversation, you'll need to come to terms on what strategy works best for your company -- mining or monitoring?  You'll also need to think about whether you really need an outside service, or if you're okay pooling internal resources and stringing together some homegrown solutions until something better comes along.

Once you have this part figured out (i.e., what are people saying?), then it gets real interesting (i.e., what can you do about it?).  But I'll save that for another day...

Related Posts:

Mind The Conversation Gap (Steve Rubel)
Following On-Line Conversations is Hard Work! (Jeremy Zawodny)

Technorati Tags: Marketing, Measurement, PR, Technology

Comments

[Mike Bawden]

Mike,

Great summary of the challenges facing those who want to monitor the Communications Gap. I've added it to the list of posts people should read on my "Much Ado About Marketing" blog for Thrusday (11/17).

I also make note of the fact that PR people are particularly well-suited for this job. Given the strategic nature of the job, PR's should be able to address the issues creating communications gaps in the most effective way possible.

Thanks again for the post,

Mike Bawden
Brand Central Station

[Mike Manuel]

Thanks Mike, I think putting PR at the helm of monitoring online discussion has interesting implications for our profession (some good, some bad). I left a comment related to this on your blog post today.