Handling Social Media – Part 2: The Understanding

August 13, 2010 | Comments Off

By Fernando, Lead Evolisten Engineer

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So, you think you can handle Social Media? Great! Now what?

Well, let’s start at the beginning. What specifically is Social Media? Bypassing the fancy definitions, we can say that it’s a bunch of people coming together to talk and stuff, but not in person. The communication takes place through some sort of technological thingy, usually the Internet. The obvious examples are the ones that everyone has heard about, like facebook, twitter and all the other usual suspects (they’re only the tip of the iceberg by the way).

So, you have decided to start with twitter. You create an account and jump in to see what’s going on in there. You’re going to listen to the people, read their tweets and make everything better! After a while, you will find the first problem: there is a heck of a lot going on twitter. Like really, A LOT! You can read tweets for hours, until your eyes hurt, and get nowhere. Just in there, there are thousands upon thousands of relevant tweets to check out, hidden among millions upon millions of other stuff you don’t care about. And this is just one site. What about other popular sites? What about the whole Internet? You’re going to need some help.

Maybe hiring a couple more guys would be enough? Not really. Hiring a dirty dozen? Not really. Hiring a few thousand people and providing them with training, management and equipment? Maybe that would work, but that sounds awfully expensive. This is not going well.

ppdigital from morguefile

And it gets worse. It’s just not a matter of finding the content and reading it, that’s only the beginning. The real work comes after that. What’s the sentiment of the content? What are they talking about specifically? What’s valuable and what’s spam?

And, what if you really want to do things right and go all researchy on it. What are the demographics of these people? What about sampling and weighting? What about other stuff you don’t even know about? This is a lot of work, and you’re definitely going to need some help. Help with expertise.

Luckily, there’s one positive thing going on for you: we’re in the future! It’s the year 2010, the 21^st century! And we may not have flying cars yet or robot butlers as they promised us, but one thing we do have: information processing power and people who know how to use it. If you’re reading this blog, then you know by now that you’re not the first one to think about taming the Social Media beast. People are out there already doing this, already solving all those problems, and coming up with cold hard numbers and data that you can use to improve things. I know it because I’m one of those people.

It’s a whole new ballgame out there. Things are changing fast. Can you adapt and thrive? It is your choice. The help you need is already out there.

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