My colleagues and I are social media analysts.

I think that the purpose of this position should be explained so that our clients can take better advantage of our skills.

Social media monitoring is not Google. It is not search.

Social media is conversation.

The way in which people, online or offline, discuss ideas is not the similar to the way in which people search for information. Search is personal. Social is, well, social.

Searchers look for official reports regarding the “efficacy” of a drug. Patients and people talk about how our pain medication “works”. The concept, efficacy, is implied in the conversation.  The word, “efficacy”, itself is never mentioned in a social exchange.  A searcher, a Googler, would use “efficacy” and “aspirin”, in a search. A social media analyst would investigate online conversation using a series of terms like “aspirin”, “pain medication”, “headache”, “works”, “useful”, “relief”, “relieves”, etc. Social media analysts specialise in the investigation of discussion and conversation, not in search.

This can get complicated, especially in the European sphere of social media. Consider, as our Italian analyst notes, the gender of an Italian adjective. If something is good, then good can be buono or buona, dependent upon if the good thing is a feminine or masculine noun. Then, if the noun is plural, an “s” can be added to either adjective form.

German, our Austrian analyst observes, complicates conversation through demanding that words change their format dependent upon their position in the sentence.  Our French-speaking analyst adds that there’s also the issue of blogger/forum slang. She points to a USA MTV show now broadcast in France and Belgium that uses what might be “verlan” or Arabic French slang in its title. Slang in France has caused even the purist French authorities to reconsider the encroachment English and Arabic are having on the French language.

All this conversational nuance must be considered in creating a successful social media project to monitor and measure topics of interest to you or your client. The position of the analyst is also helpful in determining things like

• the location of certain types of buzz (the British “Bobbies” are located in London, the “Garda” in Dublin, and the NYPD in New York…or the movies),
• the level of education embedded in the buzz demographic (kids discuss a “runny nose” and doctors blog about “excessive mucus”), and
• the popularity of the blogger (how many people are quoting Perez Hilton in the social media gossip sphere?).

So before buying into the social media software with the complete confidence a semi-pro Googler, think about the information that you are looking to capture out of the online conversation.

Then consider a conversation with a social media analyst.

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