FreshNetworks Blog

Over the last few weeks we’ve been carrying out detailed tests and analysis on 7 of the leading social media monitoring tools – Alterian, Brandwatch, Biz360, Neilsen Buzzmetrics, Radian6, Scoutlabs and Sysomos. Our aim is to provide an in-depth comparison of buzz tracking tools that accurately depicts their individual pros and cons.

We’ve put the tools to the test by tracking well-known international coffee company Starbucks. We compared over 19,000 online conversations, giving us some really unexpected results and highlighting some staggering differences in the way each tool performs.

Over the next few weeks we’ll be blogging about our findings, and at the end of the series you’ll be able to download the full report for free. We’ll cover:

• The basics of social media monitoring
• An overview of our results
• The location of online conversations
• Social media monitoring and duplication
• Data latency
• Sentiment analysis
• International/multilingual social media monitoring

We’re also holding a free social media monitoring breakfast seminar on 15th April in London, where we’ll be presenting our findings, as well as giving practical tips and advice about social media monitoring and the best way to analyse results. You can register for the event by clicking on the button below:

So what are social media monitoring tools?

In a nutshell, social media monitoring tools pretty much do what they say on the tin – they monitor online conversations taking place through social media.  They track anything that’s being said about your business or your brand on blogs, forums, Twitter and other social spaces. Each tool is different, varying in complexity and in the way they gather and process the information, as we will show you over the next few weeks.

Our sister company, FreshMinds Research, has been using social media tools to generate customer insights for years. As we’re a social media agency, we usually work with FreshMinds Research to conduct social media audits or monitoring when establishing a  social media strategy for clients. So over the next few weeks you’ll benefit from the unique findings of a research company working in collaboration with a social media agency.

We’ll start with the basics and work through our research step-by-step. If at any time you want us to explore a certain aspect in more detail, please let us know. Our next post will explore the basics of social media monitoring.

Read the other posts from our social media monitoring review 2010.

An experiment by students at MIT has shown that they were able to ‘successfully’ predict the sexuality of people based on their friends on Facebook. The so-called ‘Project Gaydar’* showed that by looking at information that a person’s friends share online (in this case, their gender and sexual preferences) they were able to learn something about an individual themselves, even if their profile had high levels of privacy.

On one hand this may not be ground-breaking research – people tend to be friends with people who have similar interests to them and so it might be expected that gay men are likely to have a higher than average proportion of gay male friends. However, the research does highlight, again, the privacy issues that people need to think about when using social networks, and when sharing information online.

The ongoing growth of social networks and online communities is actually the tale of the ongoing growth of people sharing information online. This is a good thing. People are connecting with friends old and new, and are engaging with people and organisations who have similar interests, face similar challenges or are discussing similar questions. This sharing of information is unprecedented. It allows people to get advice and recommendations from people like them, and from people who are in similar situations. This is a huge benefit to individuals and organisations alike, but this sharing of information does, of course, mean that people are sharing things about themselves with anybody who may stumble cross the content they have added. And if people are able to put together your contributions to various communities and sites, they may know more about you than you realise.

That people can read things that you are sharing online should be no surprise to anybody. But that people can analyse your connections and the various contributions you make across the web, now and in the past, means that they can, if they so choose, build up a fairly comprehensive picture. What the MIT students did with just one facet of somebody’s life (their sexuality) could be repeated to build a much more complete picture of people using the information they leave across social networks and online communities. That this surprises people is a sign of the maturity of social networking, and online communities more broadly asa social phenomenon.

People are, in many cases, just using online communities as extensions of their offline activity. They are doing old things in new ways. Meeting people, talking to friends, solving problems, sharing advice. The real power of social media is that it is a large collection of information that is connected to people, organisations or places, and that is archived and kept for posterity. It can be sorted, added to, amended and changed by the person who originally contributed it or by others. People are associating themselves with data in a vast information resource, just by doing what they will do anyway.

This is, of course, the power of social media and why it offers so much to us all. But many people are still thinking of it as just a new medium through which to do old things. That is why they don’t realise the full extent of what they are sharing (and why this can be a powerful and good thing) and why they are shocked by the findings of studies such as ‘Project Gaydar’ at MIT.

* You can read the full paper here – Gaydar: Facebook friendships expose sexual orientation

Reports today suggest that Twitter is planning to roll-out a range of new premium features that it hopes will appeal to a corporate market. We’ve written before about how brands can use Twitter, and there are many examples of brands who are seeing quantifiable benefits from their use of Twitter. Dell’s $3m in revenue from one Twitter account is just one example. Twitter is an integral part of brand social media strategies and businesses, organisations and even celebrity brands are benefiting from it. Among the chatter about how Twitter might monetise, one option has always stood out – to offer additional, premium services to corporate accounts. This week’s announcements are a step towards this.

In an interview reported in the LA Times, Biz Stone, Twitter co-founder, talked about future developments for the social media tool, specifically potential premium features. As the LA Times reports:

[Stone] said the company will introduce commercial accounts for businesses by year end that will “make them better Twitterers.” Stone emphasized that Twitter would remain free for all users, including businesses. But corporate users will have the option of paying for extra features such as analytics, which help businesses measure their online popularity and monitor traffic.

Any move to offer such premium services would obviously have to add real value to those businesses who are using Twitter. The real excitement of Twitter is that different people (and different businesses) are using it for different reasons. From a business and brand perspective, they might be using it for research, word-of-mouth, customer service, new customer acquisition, advertising. The list is endless. Twitter is in an experimental stage at the moment and the number of different uses and applications of the tool is probably as large as the number of businesses using the tool in total.

So any attempt to monetise the site by offering premium services will need to t dechink carefully about how people are currently using the service and, perhaps more importantly, how it will develop and brand use of it will develop.

A good analytics tool is certainly of interest, especially if it offers comprehensive buzz monitoring – helping brands to understand what people are saying about them on Twitter, then to identify these people and connect with them. Providing a tool that will enable brands to engage with people directly through an analytics and engagement tool. However, for any premium service to be of real use I suspect it would need to offer more than this. The clients that we work with at FreshNetworks, for example, would need more pay Twitter for additional services. Each of them would probably want different things, but one that would be common to all of them is access to users. A service that allowed them to identify and then contact Twitter users talking about their brand, market or organisation would have real value. Of course, any distribution of contact details like this would break Twitter’s own terms of service with its users and no doubt alienate them as well.

Premium services for brands on Twitter have the possibility of being of real value. But what these services could be needs some real thinking about…

Guest post by Ben LaMothe

Last week, we posted part one of our interview with Shirley Brady BusinessWeek’s first community editor. In this second part, Shirley explains how she interacts with BusinessWeek’s news desk and how the BusinessWeek community management strategy is changing, including how BusinessWeek utilises crowdsourcing.

How much interaction is there between you at the Community desk and the editors on the content-producing side? Do you advise on what you believe will get the desired reaction from the BusinessWeek community?

I’m constantly interacting with my colleagues to parlay reader feedback and suggestions to editorial. Part of this job involves standing up for the reader and voicing their concerns and desires (enough of them know me by now, and on Twitter, to email or DM me to express their views. My email address is also listed on our featured readers page.

And another part is almost media literacy – involving readers in our journalism, opening up our process while inviting and respecting their opinions on a subject. You’ll see our reporters on their blogs and on Twitter, for example, posing questions and gauging the sentiment on a story as they’re reporting it. They’re not only cultivating sources and building their own communities, but getting more informed about each story, and their beats, in the process. We create hashtags, put up daily polls and ask a lot of questions – it all helps inform editorial decision-making in terms of what will resonate with our readership.

Community management is becoming increasingly important in the news industry as organizations begin crowdsourcing aspects of coverage. How is BusinessWeek’s community management strategy evolving? What’s next?

How BusinessWeek’s community strategy will evolve will depend on the new owner, assuming McGraw-Hill reaches a deal to sell the brand (bids closed on September 15th). Hopefully whoever acquires BusinessWeek will value community-building and reader engagement as much as we do now, if not more. There’s a ton to still be done and ideas to take this to the next level, which I won’t detail for competitive reasons but hinted at above.

As for other news organizations starting to embrace reader engagement: hear, hear! It’s been gratifying to see the New York Times name its first social media editor, Jennifer Preston, earlier this year; and impressive to see the variety and inventiveness of strategies employed by my peers such as Mathew Ingram at the Globe & Mail in Canada, Andrew Nystrom at the Los Angeles Times, or Andy Carvin at NPR, or to see what the Wall Street Journal is doing with Journal Community and the NYT with TimesPeople – all smart media organizations that understand the need to foster their communities in ways that breathe life into their brands, engage people with their content and enhance their mission and value proposition to the reader. Everybody’s trying something different, and while it might not always take off with readers, this inventiveness and entrepreneurial spirit is clearly invigorating journalism at news organizations such as the ones I’ve named above and countless others, including beyond North America (I’m inspired by, for instance, the BBC’s Have Your Say and the Guardian’s Comment is Free initiatives).

As for crowdsourcing, as noted above, we actively solicit and value our readers’ involvement and “invite them into our newsroom,” as John Byrne puts it, to inform our news decisions and editorial process. But I also believe that excellent journalism (reporting, writing and editing) has to be at the core of what BusinessWeek and other news organizations do, even as we open our doors to our readers. We’re building community around our content, injecting readers into the mix, and shaking up any old notions (if they ever existed) that journalists have the market cornered on analysis and reporting – the Internet put paid to that idea, gladly.

As John’s fond of saying, it’s about treating each story (blog post, slide show, photo-essay, interactive graphic, podcast, video) as a spark that creates a camp fire, or in John’s words, “the journalism then becomes an intellectual camp fire around which you gather an audience to have a thoughtful conversation about the story’s topic.” I love that metaphor, as it really embodies what I love about journalism – the storytelling.

In addition to being a reporter and writer throughout my career, my first full-time job in journalism was on the TV side of this business as a producer for TVOntario 20 years ago. Even then, I jumped at the opportunity to set up forums and discussions on early BBS platforms (Genie, Prodigy, CompuServe) as I was eager to engage our viewers in what we were producing and get their feedback as we shaped our programming, lined up interviews and planned our on-air schedule. It also helped build buzz and interest in seeing the final product, and always sparked additional ideas for us to pursue.

It’s not far off from what I do now, although the technology has advanced, as the online community is just as lively and eager to get great content and contribute to what you’re doing: they’ll share ownership in your success if you’ll let them in. Give them a stake in your process and they’ll come back, especially if they’re treated as partners and not just pageviews. I think it also helps that I approach this as a journalist, which helps elevate and promote the smart conversations around what’s going on in the news, on Wall Street, in Silicon Valley, around the industries and business topics that matter most to our readers.

Wave Couresy of Shutterstock

People have been going mad to grab their Google Wave invites.

The’ve been auctioned on ebay and begged for in Facebook. But my favourite story so far has been the one about Ian Tait losing his Twitter mind: Ian Tait does not have 1,000 Google Wave invites

If you still haven’t got your invite, then go here for the least imaginative way to get one.

PS did you watch the first Wave video? It was good. Long but good. Sadly I was a bit put off by the t-shirts the presenters wore. It made them look like they had sweaty chests.

If you missed the content (and the t-shirts) you can see it here: