How to Fix the 8 Most Common Errors In Social Media Monitoring Data

Paine Relief

Katie Paine Solves Your Measurement Problems

Problem of the Month: 

"I keep finding errors in my social media monitoring data and management is losing confidence in my reports. What should I do?"

Solution:

As the volume of data proliferates, I and other measurati increasingly hear complaints about the integrity of the data that many of the popular monitoring systems provide. In fact, the number of decisions currently being made based on bad data is truly frightening. A recent study we conducted discovered that 60% of data delivered to a client was invalid (that includes spam, paid posts, ads for Viagra, and duplicates).

The good news is that you can get cleaner data, but it will take a little work. First, look over my How To Get Good Data Checklist. One of the most important things on this list is to remember to review your search terms with your supplier each month.

Now let's deal with some specific situations. Do any of these sound familiar?

• You know an article appeared in April, but is listed in your June results

 Fix: Check whether your vendor is reporting “day of publication” or “day of collection."

• Wrong circulation/OTS numbers

Explanation and fix: 

For online data: First check the URL. Is your system reporting for all of Yahoo, or the specific blog in which your news appeared? This happens with Facebook data all the time. Routinely, agencies and vendors are reporting “impressions” in the billions. Billions, really? Sure, if you assume that every single Facebook post reaches the entire 850,000,000-member network. (Yes, that is how some firms are reporting the “circulation” for Facebook.)

Let's think about that for a moment. First of all, if your target is the U.S., that includes only about 150 million members. Then you have to take into account that only about 10% of what is posted on Facebook is public. And only about 10% of what is public is actually seen. So at best you’re talking a reach of 1,500,000 for the U.S. Let's not even go there for Twitter. The good news is that Twitter actually tells you the number of followers an individual author has. So why do some organizations report a “circulation” for Twitter of 42 million? Because it’s easier than actually tying the Twitterer to the Tweet. 

For traditional media data: Do a common sense check. Put the data into an Excel spreadsheet and sort by circulation (OTS) largest to smallest. Now visit the URLs of the 10 items with the biggest circulation. Are they for real? For online news circulation, if you use www.compete.com you will only get the root URL, not the subdomains, so check carefully that the URL corresponds to where the item actually ran.

• Spam

Fix: Use the “find” function in Excel to do a search for "Vioxx" and "Viagra" and any other common spam terms.

• Duplicates

Fix: Go to Data in Excel and click on “remove duplicates.”  You can select the appropriate columns. We typically do it on the item URLs.

• Press releases that are picked up because the company’s boiler plate says, "has worked with clients such as..."

Fix: Do a search for “PRNEWSWIRE,” PRWEB,”  or just WIRE, and you’ll be able to quickly identify the press releases.

• Underwriting credits

Explanation and fix: Many of the broadcast clipping services now provide radio, including transpcripts from National Public Radio (NPR) as well as individual shows like Marketplace and Living on Earth. Unfortunately they haven’t figured out that those nice message-rich statements at the end of the broadcast are, in fact, paid underwriting credits. They should not count as “earned” media.

• Mentions from the UK, Germany, Australia, Canada, France and India in supposedly “US Only” clips

Fix: Look for URL domains like .dk, .fr, .ca, etc., and remove them.

• Paid Bloggers 

Fix: Sort all blogs by frequency and tone. If you get one blogger that is consistently positive and posts regularly, check him/her out. I’m not saying they are all paid, but you’ll want to double check. Any blog that has on its home page “I was paid or compensated to write this” is not earned media.

###

Katie Delahaye Paine is CEO of KDPaine & Partners, a company that delivers custom research to measure brand image, public relationships, and engagement. Katie Paine is a dynamic and experienced speaker on public relations and social media measurement. Click here for the schedule of Katie’s upcoming speaking engagements. Katie and Beth Kanter are authors of the book “Measuring the Networked Nonprofit,” to be published this year by Wiley.

The Measurement Standard is a publication of KDPaine & Partners, a company that delivers custom research to measure brand image, public relationships, and engagement. Katie Paine, CEO of KDPaine & Partners, will be glad to talk with you about measurement for your organization.

 KDPaine & Partners' Facebook Page.

Comments

[40deuce]

Great advice, Katie!
You know that despite the fact that I work for a social media monitoring software company, I'm still a huge advocate for having smart people to work in tandem with the tool. Tools are great for helping to collect and perform huge tasks, but I always recommend that people have someone who can then look through the data and make real judgements on it, like the things you pointed out above.
Tools are a great helper, but they can only do so much. You need real brain power to work with the tools as well for that great one-two punch.

Cheers,
Sheldon, community manager for Sysomos

[Nasir Khan]

Great reminder for some SM monitoring reports providers who rely heavily on the machine to do the job - cheaply, quick and dirty! I strongly believe in a good combination of man and machine to do the work credibly. Thanks