I recently finished an extensive social media analysis of a client’s competitors recently to help inform the client’s go-forward digital strategy. It was undeniably a valuable effort, an interesting look at who’s using Facebook, who’s using Twitter, who’s getting audiences to engage, who’s not.  Not only do I recommend it but the research gets even more interesting when you revisit it every six months or so.

In this case, I paid particular attention to the client’s largest competitor, a company’s that’s diving into social media aggressively – YouTube, bloggers, live tweeting, Facebook, everything. It’s clearly a well-orchestrated effort guided by a team of dedicated individuals that are also connecting the social media effort to a broader traditional media campaign. It was very effective in getting the client’s attention.

The other companies were tapping one or two social media channels, some with some apparent success – or at least they were generating a fair amount of activity.

But what do you do with this information?

I would offer that compared to competitive research around other components of the competition’s communications strategy (advertising, media relations, trade shows), you ought not to read too much into some of this competitive social media activity.

The fact is, there is a distinct chance that your competitors might be flying without a flight plan, hoping that by getting some social media initiatives off the ground, they’ll arrive somewhere of consequence. It may be tough to know the difference between a well-planned social media strategy and program with  no real strategy at all. So you may be looking for lessons that aren’t there. In fact, odds are your competitors are leaving gaps in their strategy that you can exploit – that may be the most valuable part of the effort.

The biggest issue I’m seeing right now with larger B2B companies is they are able to generate a lot of activity – blog posts, tweets, retweets of the tweets by the personal accounts of everyone on the communications team, Facebook wall posts, even videos. After all, it only takes enough time and/or money to generate activity. But a lot of them – I’d say most – are getting precious little audience engagement in return.  I’d learn from those mistakes, look for where there are glimmers of engagement, and then do better. Be creative on the backs of the failures of those that went before.

In fact, in that study I recently completed, it was one of the smaller brands that had the most intriguing success. Whether purposefully or by luck (but what difference does it make?), this was the one and only brand that managed to accumulate piles of fan posts on their Facebook pages – heartfelt posts of their memories of this nostalgia brand that reinforced that company’s brand positioning beautifully. Facebook was the perfect channel for sharing recollections of their experiences with this brand. They were capturing a sentiment and helping advocates share their stories in a way other competitors could not because their brands stood for something else.  I liked that kind of sustainable differentiation.

Until social media grow up, creativity counts for a lot. That said, competitive research is imperative – if nothing else to tell you what NOT to do.

Weber Shandwick’s SocialPulse capabilities can handle almost any competitive research challenge. As an example, here’s a study we published on the Twitter habits of Fortune 100 companies.