FreshNetworks Blog

When brands are getting started in social media, they really benefit from understanding who is currently talking about them online, what they are saying, to whom and where. After auditing what your brand footprint currently is, you can begin to make decisions about where you should have a presence, the issues of interest to people in social media and the discussions and debates that your brand can both benefit from and contribute to.

A thorough audit of your current presence in social media (or perhaps just the presence of your brand through customers, fans and others) is the first step for any social media strategy. Whilst Google Alerts provide a useful source for the latest items that are indexed by its search engine, to understand properly what is being discussed by your brand it is worthwhile investing in some detailed buzz tracking.

The best results come from using paid-for services such as Radian6. These conduct and analyse real-time, deep searching into what people are discussing in public forums and social media online that is analysed according to the reach of the posts and discussions and the influence of the people discussing your brand. You can drill-down into your keywords, understand which discussions are prevalent across different social networks and online communities and identify, measure and track your main influencers online.

As with most of our advice, however, a good first step is just to have a go. To do this you need to first establish what your keywords are and then use some tools (paid-for or free) to see what people are saying. Your keyword list is critical here and time should be put into building a list of terms about your brand, organisation, market and customers. Then you are ready to go. And if you don’t want to invest in a thorough, paid-for service right, and you are willing to put in more work and use multiple services, then there are a number of good free tools in the market. Some of these are listed below.

Only when you’ve got a clearer view of what people are saying about your brand and how it is represented online can you start to really develop a strategy to get started in social media.

In tomorrow’s post we will look at how to estabish the aims of your use of social media and how you can measure success.

You can read the full guide here: Getting Started in Social Media

Some free buzz tracking tools

Earlier this year Econsultancy produced a list of free buzz tracking tools which provides a great starting point for any brand looking to explore what is being said about it in social media. The original article is here, and the list republished below:

1. Addict-o-matic – Allows you to create a custom-made page to display search results.
2. Bloglines – A web-based personal news aggregator that can be used in place of a desktop client.
3. Blogpulse – A service of Nielsen BuzzMetrics. It analyzes and reports on daily trends within the blogosphere.
4. BoardTracker – A useful tool for scanning and tracking within forums.
5. Commentful – This service watches comments/follow-ups on Blog posts and similar content such as Flickr or Digg.
6. FriendFeed Search – Scans all FriendFeed activity.
7. Google Alerts –Daily or real-time alerts emailed to you whenever a specific keyword (chosen by you) is mentioned.
8. HowSociable? – A simple way for you to begin measuring your brand’s visibility on the social web.
9. Icerocket – Searches a variety of online services, including Twitter, blogs, videos and MySpace.
10. Keotag – Keyword searches across the internet landscape.
11. MonitorThis – Subscribes you to up to 20 different RSS feeds through one stream.
12. Samepoint – A conversation search engine.
13. Surchur – An interactive dashboard covering search engines and most social media sites.
14. Technorati – Search engine and monitoring tool for user-generated media and blogs
15. Tinker – Real-time conversations from social media sources such as Twitter and Facebook.
16. TweetDeck – Not only a great way to manage your Twitter account, but the keyword search means you can see what people are saying about you.
17. Twitter Search – Twitter’s very own search tool is a great resource. Can be subscribed to as an RSS ffed.
18. UberVU - Track and engage with user sentiment across the likes of, FriendFeed, Digg, Picasa, Twitter and Flickr.
19. wikiAlarm – Alerts you to when a Wikipedia entry has been changed.
20. Yahoo! Sideline – A TweetDeck-esque tool from Yahoo. Monitor, search and engage with the Twittersphere.

Facebook is a great source of information on how people are feeling. I can tell if my friends are happy or sad on a given day based on the updates that appear in my feed. Just imagine the potential of analysing what everybody says of Facebook on a given day. The ability to measure how happy or sad the Facebook users of the world are based on what they say on the social network. This is exactly what Facebook are doing with their Gross National Happiness based on an analysis of the positive and negative words people use when updating their Facebook status.

This is an example of buzz tracking and analysis. Looking at the words and phrases that people use in social media and then using sentiment analysis to assess how positively or negatively they feel about something. With Facebook, the opportunity is huge. If you combine the ability to analyse the sentiment in status updates with the vast amount of profiling data, the potential for insight into consumer behaviour is huge. Macro-level analysis of sentiment could be analysed. What is the impact on male students in New York of a new advertising campaign on the subway, for example? Or how does a government policy aimed at mums impact women in London? The ability to segment and analyse on this basis is huge. And if you add into this the ability to analyse the networks that people sit in on Facebook, and the impact an event has on them and on their friends, this could be a huge resource of information for brands and organisations to learn from.

It is, however, a shame that Facebook hasn’t yet produced data like this. The initial analysis of the Gross National Happiness, for the US, shows two things: people are least happy when public figures die, and most happy during public holidays. Informative stuff.

The real opportunity of the Gross National Happiness analysis, and of buzz-tracking more generally is not to understand what a large mass of people think and do, but to combine this data with more detailed profiling information to really analyse what different segments of customers and stakeholders think. This is where buzz-tracking starts to add real value – comparing the discussions that different people have and analysing their sentiment based on other things we know about them. Are women more likely to be positive about a brand than men, for example. Are customers of a certain value more likely to respond positively to announced product changes than those who spend less per annum?

The Groos National Happiness index really does miss out on the real insight that you can get from buzz-tracking. By combining the universe of Facebook users, the distinctions and differences that exist, and that start to provide real insight into the way people think and behave, and hidden in the data. Buzz tracking offers a really valuable source of insight for brands and organisations, especially when it compares what people say (the buzz and sentiment) with other profiling data we have about them.

On Sunday, lots of people were talking about Dannii, Danyl and instant X-Factor feedback. If you weren’t one of them (or if you’re not in the UK) let me quickly recap: on X-Factor, a talent / singing / reality TV programme, one of the judges, Dannii Minogue, brought up the sexuality of contestant Danyl when she was supposed to be commenting on his performance on stage. There has been a lot discussed about this and we posted about how Twitter is a great barometer and feedback mechanism in this kind of situation, how the brand that is X-Factor was able, almost immediately, to know what was being said about them and to plan how they should respond.

Like any good brand, the X-Factor on Saturday night would have benefited greatly from buzz tracking. From watching, tracking and analysing what was being said in real time. Analysing the extent to which the sentiments being expressed were positive, or negative, finding particularly dense areas of discussions and helping the brand to identify both what is being said and also where it is being said.

Buzz tracking really is a powerful tool for a brand, both because of the information it can reveal, but also because of the issues it raises that a brand needs to deal with. Tracking and monitoring what people are saying about your brand, products and services will allow you to know, in real-time, when something has happened that needs rectifying, or when something is said that you can use to amplify positive word of mouth about your brand. Knowing the extent to which your brand is being discussed positively or negatively provides a benchmark for you to monitor, and if you track it overtime you will start to see the impact of things you do and say, as a brand, on how people are discussing you.

And this information is very powerful. Both for making immediate decisions, and for planning and monitoring in the long-term. When a brand has a bad experience, and people are talking negatively about it (as happened to brand X-Factor on Saturday night), an effective buzz monitoring strategy will alert you to this shift in sentiment and allow you to identify what has caused this. You are then able to decide first if you want to respond and then how. You can then monitor the impact your response is having and amend or strengthen is as necessary. This information drastically shortens the time brands need to respond and so can have a very positive effect on your ability to resolve what is happening.

In the long-term, buzz tracking allows a brand to understand seasonal changes in it’s image in social media, and to show the impact that various on and offline activities have on these discussions. Work that we have done at FreshNetworks for brands in the travel industry, for example, shows that people tend to be more positive about travel brands at certain times of the year (typically when they are thinking of going on holiday or when they just return) and has helped to show the impact that TV advertising campaigns have had on the positive sentiment expressed about a brand online.

So buzz tracking is a powerful tool for any brand, both for what it tells you and for what it allows you to do. It is an information resource, and one that, if used correctly, can give you a real-time understanding of what is being said about your brand and how people are feeling about it. This kind of information is the ammunition any brand needs to inform its own social media strategy and how it should react on a case-by-case basis. Rather than have to wait to see how an issue plays out over a few days, brands can now get a real understanding of how people feel in real time and then respond to it.

Research in September by 360i, a search agency in London, shows a direct correlation between the balance of negative and positive Tweets about a movie, and its performance at the box office. Looking at four movies (District 9, The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard, The Time Traveler’s Wife and Brüno) they show that films that have a greater proportion of negative posts and reviews on Twitter also enjoy a higher day-on-day fall in Box Office ticket sales after launch. And whilst we must not confuse correlation with causality, it seems for these movies that those movies who have more negative posts on Twitter also see a bigger drop in sales after they open.

The relationship between Twitter and the success of a movie is starting to become clearer. Whilst this data is not sufficient to claim that there is a direct impact of negative reviews on Twitter on ticket sales, it is evident that negative reviews in Twitter, among other things, are impacting on consumer choices. And in many cases they are choosing not to view the movie.

Traditional movie marketing and performance is tracked closely, with day-on-day ticket sales being measured and the results feeding directly into the amount and type of PR and marketing activities that take place. This is a long-standing technique that is used to bolster ticket sales if they are not performing as well as expected, and to identify over-performing movies and work to amplify the impact they are having. With social media, this approach needs to adapt and change.

The main impact of Twitter is its speed. It is easy and quick for movie-goers to post a review of the movie they have just seen, and for a blockbuster movie in an opening weekend, you might expect many thousands of reviews in a short space of time. The content is concentrated in a small amount of time and discussions about a particular movie can quickly become trending topics. For a short amount of time it is relatively easy for it to seem that “everybody is talking about” a movie when it opens. And if users are negative about it, then this can have a serious impact on the movie and on ticket sales. This is dangerous for the studios, especially those who don’t have an effective social media marketing strategy. They can very quickly lose control of their movie’s reputation and the positive word-of-mouth can get drowned by the negative.

Twitter is, in fact, a great place for studios. Whether the direct causation between negative posts and decreasing box office sales is true or not does not matter. Twitter provides an instant and detailed feedback mechanism for studios. Those with effective buzz tracking and monitoring services can quickly see the impact of a movie from the moment the audience leaves the first screening. They can then use social media, and traditional marketing and PR activities, to amplify the positive word of mouth and also to help to minimise the impact of the negative. By knowing and tracking what is going on, studios can use this information to their benefit.

Some more reading

• The Internet Takes Control of Movie Marketing (cinematical.com)
• Did Twitter bring glory to Tarantino’s new flick? (seattlepi.com)
• Is Twitter Affecting the Box Office? (mediabistro.com)
• Twitter Can Bury a Movie. It Can Also Make it a Success (mashable.com)

People often describe Twitter as “Facebook reduced only to the status update”. I always found this a poor description, as there was always a significant difference between my Twitter updates and Facebook statuses. With Facebook I can only tell people about me; with Twitter, I can include other people and other topics in the conversation. This is what @ replies do on Twitter – they let me include other people in my updates and associate it with them as much as it is associated with me.

Using @ replies in Twitter is a way to share and connect through content. I can write, for example, about my colleague @cosmond, and include him in the post. That post will then appear on my wall and on Charlie’s. People who follow me or who follow Charlie will then see that I wrote about him.

This is a small but important piece of functionality. It changes my updates from being informational and for my friends and connections only, to being connectors. They organise information based on the people mentioned and connect me with the people I include (and them with me). We move from a situation where I connect with friends and distribute my content, to one where I connect with people through my content. This has a significant impact on the dynamics of the social network; elevating content over just personal connections and allowing you to distribute it further and more easily.

This week, Facebook did become more like Twitter. They have launched their own version of @ replies (called @ mentions), which allow you to include your friends, groups and pages in your status updates and posts on Facebook. You also post your update to your friend’s wall, and link to them. You are starting to connect people to content and to organise what you write. As Facebook say in their blog post explaining the new development:

People often update their status to reflect their thoughts and feelings, or to mention things they feel like sharing. Sometimes that includes referencing friends, groups or even events they are attending — for instance, posting “Grabbing lunch with Meredith Chin” or “I’m heading to Starbucks Coffee Company — anyone want some coffee?”

So, Facebook has taken a step closer to Twitter. Social networks are moving from just connecting people based on friendship to organising and linking people based on content.

Some more reading

• Facebook copies Twitter, adds @replies (inquisitr.com)
• Facebook Is Going for Some Twitter Sensibility (nytimes.com)
• BREAKING: Facebook Introduces @Mentions in Status Updates (mashable.com)
• Facebook adopts Twitterspeak for tagging friends in updates (venturebeat.com)