Social Media Monitor

By Harry van Vliet on 8 May 2009

Got my hands on the first edition of the social media monitor. And to say it upfront: disappointing. For some reason I was excited to read this, maybe because social media is also a major topic in our own research program. Knowing how hard it is to define and model social media in order to deduce some relevant research questions, I expected new insights and some help to bring our own research one step closer to the Holy Grail. Alas!

This report addresses the presence of brands on popular social media websites in Holland. It concentrates on the largest social media sites in Holland (Hyves, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and Flickr) and takes the top 100 advertisers of Nielsen Media Research. It looks into if these brands are present at the social media sites and whether or not there is some form of communication. This results in a ranking of which brands score best. In its method it fails miserably. For one thing the researchers have no clue on how much of the presence of a brand on the social media websites has actually been accounted for. So how representative the results are…no clue. The method of scoring on several variables is also not all to clear. What for instance does Œutilizes the possibilities of social media‚ mean and why can you score on only four options? What is more, there is some (statistic) fiddling with the scores, of which the researchers do not seem to be aware.  For instance: on each social media website the maximum score is 100. For some reason that stays obscure YouTube, Flickr and a weblog are taken as one single category, each contributing 33 points to a total (!) of 100. In the end Flickr is left out of the equation, but this is not taken into account in the possible score of this category (as a correction YouTube and the weblog should receive a maximum score of 50 instead of 33). When taking this into account the presented ranking already changes.

So we don’t even have to go into more tricky questions such as what the difference between a score of 41,3 and 37,3 means. Or how the researchers can make firm statements on each company’s communication strategy. So no holy grail here, not even a tin cup…

tagged with: paper, research, social media

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