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Audio:
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Slides: Social Media Monitoring Tools
Transcript:
Okay. So what we’re going to talk about, quite simply, is, I’m not going to talk about why
social media is useful, what it can do, what it can’t do, how negative or positive messages
can spread, you know, virally, over the Internet in a matter of hours.
More specifically, I just, actually, want to, just, you know, I know a lot of companies are
here that talk about, sort of, services they offer measuring sentiment. Talking about, you
know, tracking the number of blog mentions et cetera. And, the truth is, they, a lot of
them do a very good service.
However, when I set up the company, it must have been about two years ago now, I
wanted to start tracking certain trends. But all the companies out there were, to be honest,
charging quite a lot of money for what was, you know, for my small business, we couldn’t
afford it. So I started to search, you know, what ,actually, is out there which is free and
also monitors things, perhaps not as thoroughly, but can certainly give me useful snapshots
about what’s being said about my brand and issues I’m interested in.
So, with that in mind, I just put together a, sort of, list of, essentially, the tools which I find
most useful, and all of these are free. They’re open source. I’ve got all the links there.
So I’m just, basically, going to talk through a few of them and just tell you why I think they
are good, and, you know, why I think they can benefit your brands.
Okay. So, starting off with the tool ScatterBrand overview. I’m not going to dwell too
much on this. If you haven’t already set up a Google Alert, you’re sort of missing a little
bit of a trick, but those of you who don’t know about it, quite simply, put in a few keywords
and you can get a comprehensive, sort of, daily email digest of brand mentions across the
Internet. A very, sort of, top level, you can set up for once a week, or once an hour, even.
Similarly, social mentions, you know, sort of, very much, sort of a top level monitoring of
what’s being said about whatever keyword search terms you put in. But, pretty much
across all the major social media spaces. It searches, I think, over eighty plus platforms at
the moment. And also, on the left-hand side, you can see, it, sort of, shows sentiment.
As I said, nothing as thorough as the sort of thing you can pay for, but it can give you,
relatively, sort of, a interesting idea about keywords associated with your brand. However,
I wouldn’t go too much, and look too much in terms of what I said about whether what is
being said is positive or negative, because, to be honest, it isn’t particularly accurate.
However, it can give you a very interesting overview, and this is of where people are talking
about your brands. You know, the first thing, as you’ve probably heard many times today,
before you have any social media strategy, you’ve got to listen. And that’s because you
need to understand, where are people talking about your brands. If you’re going to, for
example, talk about, you know, white vans. You know, you work for Ford, you want to
sell white vans. Are you going to set up a Twitter page? Probably not. Probably not
really typically your whit van man goes on Twitter. So using tools like this, before you
start to implement anything, can give you a real idea as to where it is people are talking
about your brands.
To look at bit more at what they’re saying and a little bit more specifically into sentiment, I
use various other tools. Of course, I do use some paid ones, to calm everyone’s nerves
whose trying to sell something. But there are a few that can give you a bit more detailed
analysis within specific forums.
So moving on. This is a relatively new search kind of engine. It’s called Who’s talking. I
really like it for searching networks. It’s based on keywords, again. You can put in the
name of your brand. Use the example Microsoft there. And it will, basically, mention any
kind of group or open, sort of, messaging on all the, kind of, typical, most popular, sort of,
social networks like Bebo, Facebook, Myspace, et cetera. And, Tweetbeat, similar to
Google Alerts. If you haven’t got one of these set up already, I’m sure you will shortly.
Same sort of thing, put in a few keywords, you’ll get a daily, or hourly, or weekly digest
of mentions of your brand on Twitter. A very nice way to, basically, get information that
affects you without having to go to a different service. It just comes directly to your inbox,
and as I said, all totally free.
Now it’s actually probably one of my favorite tools, it’s slightly buggy sometimes, but why
I really like it, is because you put in the name of your brand, use Sony there as an example,
and you can track, over time, whether it’s twenty-four hours, seven days, thirty days, ninety
days, or a hundred and eighty days. And you can track the amount of Tweets that
keyword has got over that period of time. In addition, you can actually focus in on those
certain days, so you can see, when there’s been a spike in interest in your brand on Twitter,
what were the Tweets that were being, you know, what were the Tweets of that day. So,
for example, you know, in the Sony example, you can have a look at the Tweets underneath,
and it’s all, sort of, Beyonce and Lady Gaga’s video phone, apparently. So, you see, that
was the theme of the day that made, that led to the spike in interest in Sony. Likewise,
going out to Traffic Guru, for example, if you run it through this, you will see a massive
increase on a certain day, and in a certain hour. And it allows you to see, essentially, what
was the main Tweet that led to a spike in interest in a brand. So it can be a pretty useful
tool.
Moving on, just, very simply, to search Blogs. There are various Blog search engines out
there. I personally like this one, because it’s quite simple to use, very engaging, and, also,
the way it categorizes a search of blogs is based on the number of in-bound links which
works in a pretty similar way to Google. So it just gives you a very, sort of, nice idea of,
if people are blogging about your brand, you know, what are the major Blogs which are
talking about it. And this is a, also search Blogs, Trendpedia.com. Search also will give
you a search list like Technocrati, but I don’t find it quite as useful because it categorizes
them by date as opposed to popularity, or the number of in-bound links. But it does give
you the ability to compare search terms. Or, you can put your brand in and that of a
competitor and see the number of mentions. It won’t give you sentiment, but it does give
you a pretty, sort of, interesting overview of your brand in terms of number of mentions
on Blogs. So have you seen there, put in David Cameron and Gordon Brown, as I
mentioned, not particularly popular, however, he is getting a fairly high level, number of
blog posts. Of course, not so are positive. But, anyway, interesting to note that he is in
the news. Well, I assume he would be, he’s the Prime Minister.
Another one. Forums and message boards. And this is quite interesting, because forums
and message boards, really a sort of, I always sort of, finishing? One minute. Okay.
Forums and message boards, one of the oldest, sort of, types of social media. Sort of
thought of the old bulletin days. Anyway, still high, you know, still used by a lot of people,
personally I find them frustrating, but people use them and they do use them to talk about
brands. You know, similar to the other searches, this tool basically allows you to track
conversations, in forums, about your brand. And from the list it will create, it can allow
you to track a whole thread, a whole conversation and debate about a brand. And it can
be really interesting to, you know, it gives a real valuable, sort of, market research into
what’s being said. In addition, it allows you to run up to three search terms on the number
of mentions on forums about your brand. So I just chucked in a few example there. And
you can track anything up to, I think it goes back six months in time.
So, that’s pretty much it. I just wanted to do something quite quick and just to give you
something tools. You know, there are thousands out there. These are just the ones I,
personally, find really useful and which are free, that is.