The ‘magical’ world of social media monitoring

I started my internship at Attentio about two months ago. My objectives? As I was writing a thesis on the ROI of social media, I wanted to indulge myself in the ‘magical’ world of social media monitoring.

But first, let me introduce myself: my name is Titia Vanbael and I am a Belgium based Business Management student (focus on Marketing). I am quite ambitious, which led me to accepting a quite challenging thesis subject. A non-profit organisation asked me to calculate the monetary value of blog posts mentioning their organisation in one way or another. At first I thought I would be able to answer that question, despite the fact that I am a total layman in the social media field and that I had no clue on where to begin.

But after a few months of internet research, attending some events and interviewing some social media ‘experts’, I was not much further in answering my question. There is still no measurement standard for the ROI of social media, so I thought I should take a closer look to the practical side of social media monitoring and analytics. That way I could understand better how social media is monitored today and what could possibly be the ROI. During my research I stumbled upon Attentio, the only social media monitoring company in Belgium so far.

I contacted them immediately, asking if they could teach me how they monitor social media, how they analyze the data and eventually turn that data into reports. That way I could see if there was a possibility to calculate the ROI of a blog post and if not, I would still have learned a lot that I could use as an input for my thesis. They were really enthusiastic and after a short interview I could start as a social media intern the week after.

Being a social media novice, I had a lot of things to learn. But all of the Attentio staff were very patient and explained everything there was to know. So after a few days I was able to work with the dashboard quite independently; downloading documents, setting up projects and even analyzing some data (at least when it was in a language I could understand). After a few weeks, setting up a dashboard did not held (a lot of) secrets for me anymore and therefore I could do quite independently. Although I became more familiar with the dashboard, setting up keywords still is a difficult job (although it may seem easy). It is time-consuming and quite hard to make sure all the results in the dashboard are relevant. I also realised that social media monitoring is not (yet) 100% accurate, but that it can give some really helpful and good insights.

So after almost two months of working with the Attentio dashboard, I think I can now say I am not a social media novice anymore. I am so thankful to all of the Attentio staff for every single minute they spent with teaching me how to use the dashboard. I am also very grateful for the opportunity they gave me to learn something that was really useful, not only for my future career, but also for the thesis I wrote on social media ROI.

Although I was not able to find the answer to my question, at least I could think independently about the ROI of social media and come up with some possible alternatives, all thanks to the practical training. I was also able to answer all the questions the jury asked me during my thesis presentation.

1 Comment »

1. 

   Nice. Thanks for sharing your thoughts. It was interesting to read.

   Comment by thesis — July 20, 2010 @ 3:39 pm

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