social monitoring

robwatts — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 15:07:12 +0000

Not just another social media monitoring tool

I’m writing this post on an iPhone whilst watching Arsenal trail 2-1 to Stoke, a testament to the interconnected world we inhabit today. A world where we can interact w/ our networks from virtually anywhere, a world where the old constraints of modems and hard wired cables in a phone socket are but a bemusing memory of a place left alone in the roadmap of time.

Back then we usually had to wait before reading a response to a post or a comment. Facebook and Twitter, the proliferation of other nkotb like foursquare, gowalla, brightkite et al were just twinkles in the eye of their respective founders. Today all are becoming a mainstay of the online world, acting as sharepoints for the herds that flock to the power of their distributive connectivity; full of people chattering and networking, discussing themes and topics of their everyday lives. Lets face it, it’s nothing short of a technological social revolution; the web how it should be, as envisaged by the technerd visionaries striving to push it all that little bit further.

As a result of all this, quite a few of us have got excited by the opportunities that this activity presents. Never before has it been so easy to connect w/ people in their ‘moment’ never before has it been possible to identify so very quickly, people who are talking about you, your brand or topics and products important to your interests. The whole proliferation of listening tools that have sprung up is testament to the hunger and appetite for finding new ways of measuring, interacting and building relationships w/ those of import.

In terms of the tools available we have a wide and awesome array. Some do a good job and some simply overwhelm. Of the hardcore tools I’ve used I must confess that some ( even for a tech head like me ) provided too much. There weren’t any that I knew of that enabled me to simplistically look at a couple of important web nodes ( the blogosphere and Twitter ) and not only listen and monitor, but respond to, and share internally, to identify and classify as a CRM or Sales opp, a Marketing or Crisis management issue. All did lots of things really well, but none offered the kind of things I was interested in at a one stop shop.

See for me, at a keyword brand or product conversation level, there usually exists a need. A need to find, a need to share, grow, love, hate, acquire, enquire, inspire even – people tend to talk about such things in blogs, social status updates or forums w/ niche followings or interests. Brands especially can no longer rely on traditional offline media to build brand, neither can they depend on law to silence vociferous detractors, the option of sitting back and allowing conversations to develop w/ no awareness of or engagement w/ is a recipe for soon to be disaster.

Yet honing all that down and acquiring meaningful insight into such events, in the absence of some uber web understanding was and for many still is incredibly difficult. Could crowd sourcing and the wisdom of the masses hold the key?

You betcha! I didn’t know the stats to hand but I took a punt and said if anything of import is happening in the world today then it’s likely to appear in a blog a forum or in Twitter somewhere. With a little pipery and Tommy Cooper jush like thatery I was pretty sure that I could build something that not only allowed people to do the traditional response thing, but to also begin to understand some of the DNA beneath. The ability to identify friends and foes, the ability to extract positive or negative external references, the ability to measure the relative power and importance of what those referenced nodes were about. The ability to segment and take snapshots in time. Actionable insights into cause and effect. How f*#^%in cool to be able to say, right – we launched product x or initiative y and this is how the world/continent/country/region/town responded. These are the people who influenced things, these are the places where it happened and this is where we need to do better.

Of course in terms of the whole GEO thing it’s still early days but, wow, what an exciting time for both marketers and consumers. Anyone who even half gets this stuff who fails to feel the power needs to pack it in tomorrow.

Ok, so yes – it isn’t oauth yet ( I got this thing called a day job) it isn’t beautiful on the eye, it needs a bit more ajaxification, it needs a little negative matching and a few more reporting options (pretty PDFs anyone) but it’s getting there. I hope you give it a try and if you find it useful, support the effort

Cheers

Rob

Sent from an iPhone

social monitoring

robwatts — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 23:35:06 +0000

Social Media Monitoring Tools – Yack Social

I’m pleased to announce the fruit of a little recent xmas obsession. A social monitoring tool for those who are scared by huge datasets ;0)

I think it’s pretty cool, it lets you listen, monitor, respond and report.

It doesn’t go out and spider the web. It just lets you choose words that are important to your brand or your competition and take samples from twitter and the blogosphere.

My view is that if its on the radar then it’ll end up in blogs or twitter. Lots of people use twitter, but few track what they are doing, simply because there are few very easy ways of doing so. This for me, goes some way to adding to that conversation.

I’ve a list of to do’s and am adding extra value as and when I get the time.

I could have sat here and refined and refined for ever and a day but…you’ve just gotta put things out there and see what they do sometimes.

If you encounter the odd bug, then do let me know. I’m working on it daily, so apologies if you find one. I might buy you a pint if I meet you.

It’s a chargeable, but it should make your life a little easier, especially if you are a PR, SEO, Marketing or Sales person.

It isn’t a state of the art ‘grab the web’ tool. They already exist. I’m not re-inventing the wheel.

It’s designed to let you take stock of real time and deal with it in the here and now.

Through using it you can:

Identify sales opps
Identify marketing opps
Deal with Crisis Comms
Send messages to internal depts
Check activity overtime and get learnings
Identify Retweeted Links
Identify Social Influencers
Identify the most active people for a keyword in a timeline
Export Reports to Excel
Create Charts and Graphs
Detect sentiment automatically
Mark Sentiment
Interactwith Twitter
Create up to 5 campaigns
Use Multiple Twitter Accounts
Use a Single Login with multiple aliases

Additional add ons in development are:

The ability to add negative keywords
The ability to geo target keywords
Linkedin Integration
Foursquare Integration
Email reports
Customise reports

The GEO targetting aspect mightn’t be as effective for keyword purposes, simply because of people not geo tagging their tweets. Know a tweeter? et them to geo tag their tweets!!

Initial price during Beta is just £45 per month for early bird users

I’m going to go freemium but need to recode aspects of the sign up process watch this space.

All those who sign up before the end of January will get a free month too. You can get it here

If you don’t find it useful, then after 5 days, just cancel your subscription. Stay longer and it’s a one month rolling commitment.

Use it and it gets interesting, choose your keywords judiciously and see what it puts together for you.

For those who want professional insight over and above what you can glean by yourself, there are additional custom social media reports available at extra cost. These are written by people like me and are not cheap.

If you want a great list of other tools on the market then you can find a great list here .:)