You Ask, I Answer: Social Media War Room Displays?

In today's episode, Martha asks, what software and what content should we put on our displays in our social media warroomslash command center? That's an interesting question. The answer is it depends really on what decisions you need to make. Remember, dashboards without decisions are decorations, right? And you can buy all sorts of useful, you know, decorations like art if you want to just have something on the walls.

Umcial media war rooms and social media command centers in the past have been very often for appearances' sake. Uh you put one in to show off to your senior executives, to your board, to your customers. Look, we've got this great thing with the all these screens, and it looks like something right out of the movies. Well, of course, we also know that the movies are fictional, but an awful lot of people like the way they look. It's a very expensive use of money.

Um rooms and command centers are useful for real-time decisions. So if you are running, say a big event, um and you need to make a decision in real time, um, and you need just a lot of screen real estate, you know, multiple TVs showing multiple screens, um, though that's a valid use of a command center. You're doing something really big that you're just you you couldn't do on just one single monitor or even a couple displays. You need eight or twelve displays just to get to have the relevant information in front of you. Um, in terms of what you should be displaying, there's three categories of information.

Number one, you should be displaying anomalies. So any good social media management software uh is going to collect data and present it to you in some fashion. The better packages of software are going to show you anomalies. If you normally get you know five likes on a post in the first hour, and you get 10 or 15 or 20, something that's you know, a multiple change into what's normally there. That's an anomaly.

So anomaly at speed of engagement is something that you would want to have in a command center so that you can see there's something going on with that post, and we don't know why. Let's keep an eye on that. And you should then be able to take that post and monitor that specifically and responses to that. You want to monitor content types. Are people uh is there a sudden spike or anomaly in uh the responses to you, right?

Uh people responding with videos. If so, you should probably watch those videos and see if you know there's some kind of known problem that people are sending you video evidence of. And the third anomaly to watch is sentiment. Um, even automated sentiment, e which is you know eighty-ish percent accurate, it's not great, uh, and that's a whole different topic. But even that can detect like, hey, something's taking a sudden sharp downturn, a sudden sharp turn to the negative, uh, or sudden sharp turn to the positive.

You want to be able to see that you want and you want the system to identify this is an anomaly. This is something that's unusual that stands out from all the other statistical data that you're collecting about uh the different social media channels you're on. Second thing you're gonna want to display are trends, and trends are best generally displayed as like line or bar graphs, and you want to be able to see uh in very short intervals uh what's happening. So your software should be polling your channels at you know anywhere from um 30 second to one minute to five minute intervals, depending on on how fast you need to make a decision and being able to see those trends over time, rolling averages of engagement of responses, things like that. Again, you're looking for uh changes out of the norm, something that's happening that you're like, huh, that's weird.

And it's one of those things that you should be able to see and and understand through good color coding. Like, yeah, something's up there. The third thing to have on any dashboard, particularly uh a command center, are your KPIs. And remember, a KPI is a number for which you are either promoted or fired. Um, and that should probably be on its own screen, just sort of a scorecard of what's happening so that you can see okay, these are the things that have been happening and the things that we need to pay attention to.

So you probably need at least three different screens to display anomalies, trends, and KPIs. And then more important is you need to have procedures in place when an anomaly occurs. What do you do? What is the playbook? There should literally be a binder sitting out on a desk somewhere that everyone has been trained on that says when this happens, do this, when this happens, do this.

When somebody shows sends us a video uh of a person, I don't know, spinning on the employee's food. You send you know this is the policy and procedure uh and uh uh manual for handling that. A command center is only as good as the commands you execute. So you need to be able to have those written out in advance, ready to go. Um the command center screens shouldn't require a whole lot of reading.

Uh, the software that you use, whatever software you use, should be using color coding, uh, should we have very obvious displays so that if you're standing across the room and you look, like, huh, there's all of our social posts, and they're you know, normal color, but there's five of them that are red. Uh, okay, let's go take a look at the five red ones. Right? That's the kind of thing that at a glance you should be able to see something's up. Uh, it is no different than if you look, for example, at how uh an airplane cockpit is designed.

There's not a lot of excess, right? Even though it's complicated, there's not a lot of excess in an airplane cockpit. Uh there are everything there is essential and therefore a reason. Um, and a well-designed dashboard in a cockpit or in a vehicle should have the most important things placed in front and center and obvious alarms when something is not right. So give that some thought when you're thinking about a command center and you're designing one.

Now, whose software should you use? There's uh any number of vendors out there that do excellent dashboards. Uh two that we recommend that my company is partners with, so FTC Disclosure, uh, if you buy from either of them uh through us, you we get some small financial benefit. Uh number one on the uh uh I would say is price talk walker, so you want to check them out for their dashboards and widgets, and then if you want really, really good real time, like we you're the 2024 Olympics, uh, and you absolutely need to know within seconds that something is up, you want to check out uh Zignal Labs. Those would be the two that I would recommend.

So Talk Walker for really good roll-up summaries uh and you know uh uh like really nice lobby displays, and then if you have to have an actual command center because and you need 60 second response times or less, um take a look at Signa Labs. Those would be the two that I would recommend. Good question. Be clear on what you're going to do in the command center. Be absolutely clear how you're going to use it, and make sure that the expense you go to is going to have a positive return on investment for that expense because they are expensive.

Uh and very often people have them for the wrong reasons. So uh as always, please leave your comments below, subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter, and I'll talk to you soon. Take care. Want help solving your company's data analytics and digital marketing problems? Visit TrustInsights.ai today and let us know how we can help you.