Because for social media-ites, social media analytics is a lot easier to do anything with.

Especially if think you understand people online. (Chances are you do!)

There’s more discussion going on these days about social media monitoring and analytics packages being developed, and a rift growing in the future between social media and traditional analytics.  Soon a lot more brands will be using these packages to measure the strength of their brands online, or the growth of their community and word of mouth.

The Dilemma

I have a feeling though that there will be a conflict that comes up soon about using social media analytics (SMA) platforms along with traditional analytics packages like Google Analytics.  From an independent perspective each type of platform serves a purpose and solves particular needs.  But from real world perspective, SMA will probably get the majority of the attention in the time to come, if only for the fact that people are going to feel more comfortable dealing with the metrics provided by those platforms.

Do people have a easier time judging the actions of other people than they do driving insight from click through data?

I’d have to say yes.  It’s a lot easier for people to formulate together some insights (in their head at least) trends that they see in what’s going on with a website or to come up with recommendations because people like to think that they have an understanding of people and have the ability to understand the actions that they take, especially in the social media sphere.

Traditional Analytics Is Too Hard

Traditional analytics has always been much harder. A need to know the technical meanings of the different metrics, the need to know how to use the analytics data to create actionable business insights, and therefore business value. Where as with social media analytics if a package is telling you that your company is less responsive with the voice of the community than is desired, the road from metrics to action is a lot shorter.

If you take into consideration the target user for these two platforms, traditional analytics grew out of tracking server side information and strong analytics users were traditionally people comfortable with a lot of data and statistics.  Where as SMA has been designed to be used by marketers.

What I’m Afraid Of

With this growing discussion of social media analytics, people are also picking up the message that analytics data is useless unless it can provide business insight. What I’m Afraid of is that social media professionals will evangelize SMA tools as being able to provide that insight and spread the message that traditional analytics can only ever provide that “analytics-junk”. I’m afraid of people comparing the two on a platform level, apples to oranges, rather than identifying them as being different tools used to help solve different problems.

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