Variously called buzz tracking, monitoring, analytics, scraping, mining, alerting, sentiment analysis or listening, this is all about keeping in touch with what consumers are saying about your brand or organisation. (Interesting use of language here – ‘listening’ sounds very positive and non-threatening; but when there are arguments about privacy, detractors call it web scraping. ) From the qualitative perspective it can produce ‘insights’ from terabytes of data – and its possible to track back insights to the actual social media posting they come from.
It is, quite rightly one of the techniques of greatest interest to brands and organisations, as it enables virtually ‘real time’ monitoring of what people are saying about them – and their competitors. It has input into reputation management, brand image, customer service issues, category trends and advertising and marketing campaigns. What’s not to like? And yes there are mind boggling numbers of people on Facebook who don’t know the meaning of the words ‘privacy settings’, endless review sites and postings from all over the world, but don’t forget that large numbers of social media users are fairly passive (they watch, read, but don’t post much if at all) and that in-person word of mouth still has high value. If you recommend a product to someone you know in-person, its your reputation that is at stake as well as that of the product. Online, people are more anonymous and there is less comeback. Even amongst people you would expect to be heavy social media users, in person WOM is important. (85% of teen brand word of mouth occurs offline)
At a basic level it is possible to use a range of search tools, many of them free, to simply capture what is being talked about across a range of social media, including Twitter, Facebook, blogs, Del.i.cious, etc. The analytics toolshed below shows you some of the main categories of tools. A list can be downloaded here – even though its 10 pages long it still only covers a fraction of what is avialable. List of listening and tracking tools
There are trending tools and tools that either focus on one aspect of social media e.g. Blogcatalog, or help to aggregate a range of other tools, such as Addictomatic.
This allows you to create a custom-made page to display the latest buzz on any topic. HowSociable? offers brand visibility metrics and has over 80,000 brands measured using 32 metrics. Like some of the other tools, it has moved from having a free level to a range of payment plans, although they are still very cost effective. One of the problems with free tools is the amount of duplication and old posts that turn up; success with the tools also depends on the search terms used and the amount of people who are talking about that brand.
Trackur is another that offers various levels of service including a free plan and a white label dashboard that can be customised. Whereas Traackr is an influencer identification and tracking tool that measures reach, resonance and relevance. Twitter is well served with numerous tools to do all sorts of things with Twitter feeds, from finding locations of users to statistics on average number of tweets, trending topics and so on.
The professional tools do all this but clean up the data first and then put it into a user-friendly dashboard. Have a look at this Netbase Consumerbase video to get an idea of how these tools are being sold to clients. Note in particular the emphasis on speed, accuracy and the lovely concept of ‘confirmatory insights’ a.k.a. things you knew all along. Netbase claims that its natural language processing software can ‘read and understand’ consumer posts.
Research by Freshnetworks has shown that the major professional tools ( the ones they tested were: Alterian, Biz 360, Brandwatch, Neilsen, Radian6, Scoutlabs and Sysomos) bring in different levels of conversations, with varying amounts of input from different sources, and can give quite different impressions of the buzz and sentiment around a brand a brand or topic. Sentiment analysis is a hot topic as in many cases its not able to deal with irony or sarcasm, although the tools are rapidly learning ‘slanguage’.
There is also a more general comparison in the The Forrester Wave Listening Platforms Q1
Econsultancy have just produced The Online Reputation and Buzz Monitoring Buyers Guide (December 2011). Its £250 and it covers: Alterian, ASOMO, AT internet, Attentio, BrandsEye, Brandwatch, Cymfony, Infegy (Social Radar), Market Sentinel, Meltwater Group, Onalytica, Radian6, Sentiment Metrics, Sysomos, Visible Technologies.
Text analytics tools such as Clarabridge can analyse text that comes from open ended questions in quant surveys, bulletin boards etc, so this form of analytics is not limited to social media.
