Measuring Social Media: Who Has Access to the Firehose?

At SXSW 2011, I moderated a panel titled “Measuring Social Media – Let’s Get Serious,” with the goal of having a frank discussion about the realities, pratfalls and opportunities for individuals and marketers tasked with managing social media and measuring social media ROI.

During the Q&A session of the panel, a audience member from Porter Novelli asked Kevin Weil, product lead for revenue at Twitter, a pointed and direct question that cuts to the core of the conversation surrounding social media measurements: Who has access to the data?

In the case of Twitter, the company offers free access to its API for developers. The API can provide access and insight into information about tweets, replies and keyword searches, but as developers who work with Twitter — or any large scale social network — know, that data isn’t always 100% reliable. Unreliable data is a problem when talking about measurements and analytics, where the data is helping to influence decisions related to social media marketing strategies and allocations of resources.

The question that the audience member asked — and one that we tried to touch on a bit in the panel itself — was who has access to this raw data. Twitter doesn’t comment on who has full access to its firehose, but to Weil’s credit he was at least forthcoming with some of the names, including stalwarts like Microsoft, Google and Yahoo — plus a number of smaller companies.

The Problem With Limited Access

One of the companies that has access to Twitter’s data firehose is Gnip. As we discussed in November, Twitter has entered into a partnership with Gnip that allows the social data provider to resell access to the Twitter firehose.

This is great on one level, because it means that businesses and services can access the data. The problem, as noted by panelist Raj Kadam, the CEO of Viralheat, is that Gnip’s access can be prohibitively expensive.

For measuring services that can’t afford (or aren’t willing to pay) to pay for full access, the alternative remains using the API, which can yield inconsistent results. To be clear, I’m not criticizing Gnip or its pricing model. Rather, I want to highlight the realities about data access.

It’s Not Just Twitter

The problems with reliable access to analytics and measurement information is by no means limited to Twitter. Facebook data is also tightly controlled. With Facebook, privacy controls built into the API are designed to prevent mass data scraping. This is absolutely the right decision. However, a reality of social media measurement is that Facebook Insights isn’t always reachable and the data collected from the tool is sometimes inaccurate.

It’s no surprise there’s a disconnect between the data that marketers and community managers want and the data that can be reliably accessed. Twitter and Facebook were both designed as tools for consumers. It’s only been in the last two years that the platform ecosystem aimed at serving large brands and companies — platforms and tools like Salesforce.com, Buddy Media, Viralheat, Radian6, Vitrue and Involver — have started to build out and address the needs of these business users.

We Need More Transparency for How to Access and Connect with Data

The data that companies like Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare collect are some of their most valuable assets. It isn’t fair to expect a free ride or first-class access to the data by anyone who wants it.

Having said that, more transparency about what data is available to services and brands is needed and necessary.

We’re just scraping the service of what social media monitoring, measurement and management tools can do. To get to the next level, it’s important that we all question who has access to the firehose.