Posts Tagged ‘monitoring’

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Sysomos Acquired By Marketwire

10.07.05

In recent months we’ve seen several interesting moves within the social media monitoring/social CRM space.

Company Acquired by Date
Techrigy Alterian July 2009
Filtrbox Jive Software January 2010
Buzzgain Meltwater February 2010
Biz360 Attensity April 2010
DNA13 CNW Group April 2010
Scout Labs Lithium Technologies May 2010

(Note: CNW Group is a 76design client. Thanks to William Johnson for the DNA13 pointer and Steve Dodd for the Buzzgain tip.)

Now we’re seeing another significant player in a similar move, as Toronto-based Sysomos is acquired by news wire service Marketwire.

First reported by the Startup North blog, the news was later confirmed by Sysomos, although their blog comment and tweet have both since been deleted. So, while this is still – for now – a rumour, given that these confirmations were initially posted by the company (I saw the blog comment before its removal), I’m inclined to believe the reports and that a formal announcement is imminent.

Update: Sysomos has confirmed the acquisition. CEO Nick Koudas said in an email to me today:

“We are excited and we are looking forward to continue our innovation and enhance our creative product line.”

Sysomos

Sysomos offers three core services:

Sysomos has been noticeable in recent months with a series of smart awareness-driving tactics. In fact, they were featured in the New York Times just a day before this news. They’ve also made some interesting moves towards drawing a line between social media activity and business results with the introduction of their Audience product. It’ll be interesting to see whether/how Marketwire plans to factor this into its product lineup.

Implications

The recent spate of acquisitions isn’t surprising to anyone watching the space. Indeed, analysts like Altimeter’s Jeremiah Owyang have been commenting on the consolidation trend for a while. As Ray Wang suggests, expect to see more of this kind of activity in the coming months with other companies such as Alterian, BuzzGain, Cymfony, Radian6, Viralheat and Visible Technologies .

This particular acquisition is particularly interesting, as the acquisition is by a company on the “traditional media” side of the fence. This should help Marketwire to more effectively compete with wire services such as PR Newswire (in the US) and CNW Group (in Canada), which already feature monitoring solutions:

  • Strengthens existing monitoring services
    While PR Newswire already offers a social media monitoring service, Marketwire’s monitoring offerings are currently more limited. With social media monitoring being a common “toe in the water” for many companies as they experiment with social media, this service is becoming a must-have for traditional monitoring companies.
  • Strong analytics

    Monitoring solutions by themselves are useful, but the “clippings-style” approach to social media monitoring is really just the beginning. By acquiring a solution that allows users to do a deep dive on online conversations, Marketwire is adding a useful tool to its arsenal, and one that it doesn’t just need to white-label from other providers.
  • User-friendly interface

    Sysomos offers one of the most user-friendly web interfaces of the monitoring providers – a big bonus for less tech-savvy clients.

I’m looking forward to more information on this move soon, and to monitoring further activity in this space over coming months.

In the meantime, what do you think of this move?

Posted in: social media monitoring

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Sysomos Audience Moves Towards Measuring Social Media ROI

10.06.15

Social media ROI is a hot topic right now, as social media begins to (slowly) mature. The purists who insisted that the conversation alone was and end, rather than a means, are diminishing in volume and a more rational, approach is emerging balancing the revolutionary aspects of social media with those that are simply evolutionary from existing business practices.

One area in particular which is fast-evolving is social media monitoring (my ex-colleague Michael O’Connor Clarke quipped last week that there’s probably a micro-industry dedicated to watching it).

After several weeks of back and forth, and rescheduled meetings, I finally managed to get a demo of Sysomos Audience last week. I came away impressed.

Placing a Value on your Visitors

Sysomos Audience is an addition to the Heartbeat monitoring and engagement tool. At first glance it seems similar to Google Analytics in nature – in fact, I previously under the incorrect impression it simply connected social media traffic to web analytics. However, Audience really focuses in a different direction, providing tools that should pique the interest of your sales, marketing and community management folks alike.

Audience tracks visitors to your site alongside their previous web activity, and helps to determine whether each person is a real lead or is just browsing. It does so by examining peoples’ previous web activity, including competitors’ websites, blogs, social networks and so on. In doing so, it determines whether your visitors are qualified leads or just browsing. For example, people are much more likely to be serious sales leads if they’ve been researching other competitive products first than if they’ve just clicked through from a random site.

Critically, Audience also lets you assign a dollar value to visitors based on their visits to competitor sites, to help determine the ROI of your social media activities. It does so by letting you assign values for visits to different areas of your site (those key to your sales funnel might have a higher value, for example) and other factors. In doing so, you gain a relative value for each visitor to your site. This might seem familiar to web analytics (Google Analytics lets you assign goal values, for example) but this goes above and beyond by incorporating activities outside your own site, and by aggregating values per user.

This has implications for several functions within companies:

  1. Sales
  2. Community management
  3. Public relations

Sales

Sales folks – wouldn’t you like to know who your most valuable leads are right at the beginning of the process, so you can prioritize them accordingly? While Audience generally only provides generic tracking information for most people, if you hook the system into any web forms you have, it can link their name and information into their activities (note: you’ll likely need to amend your privacy policy in order to do this). Right now, the system doesn’t hook into Salesforce but according to Sysomos co-founder Nilesh Bansal, that functionality is on the way.

Community Management

Just as Audience lets you track your most valuable visitors, it also lets you identify the sites that are the source of the most valuable traffic to your website. In the demonstration I saw, for example, I saw that while TechCrunch drove a lot of traffic to Sysomos, the traffic from other sites on a per-user basis was actually worth more to them. For community managers, pulled in a thousand directions, this can be valuable information to help them prioritize their focus.

Public Relations

The idea of being able to place a value on the traffic from a piece of coverage is mouth-watering to me. For one, it gives a great answer to the “what’s the ROI of this pitch” question (which even traditional media relations hasn’t solved yet) but also it helps you to figure out who you need to build relationships with and on whom you should focus your pitching. Of course, it doesn’t remove the hands-on targeting and tailoring work that goes into each project, but this kind of data would still be immensely valuable.

Privacy Concerns?

The only question that worried me during the demo I received revolved around online privacy. How does Audience determine which sites people have visited recently? Every site I’ve seen reviewing Audience – from TechCrunch to ReadWriteWeb to Web Metrics Guru – have wondered but no answers are forthcoming. While Sysomos doesn’t currently pull user profiles in, it’s only a small step from there to linking a Twitter or Blogger profile into things and having a complete record of your visitors’ browsing habits. That’s hypothetical but a little concerning as I’m sure they’ll experience pressure to add that feature.

Sysomos’ Nilesh Bansal wouldn’t shed any light on the question when I spoke with him. He told me they don’t look at cookies, but that Audience uses a piece of JavaScript code which you embed on your site and correlates that with their social media monitoring database. So, how do they know people have been on a competitor’s site? It sounds a little dubious to me. As long as they don’t shed any insight into this, people will continue to wonder what’s going on.

Exciting Potential

Setting aside the privacy concerns for a moment, Audience really does have a lot of potential, especially if you’re already a Sysomos client. The product is still in closed beta testing for now and Sysomos hasn’t announced pricing but, like Radian6’s engagement console, this looks to be a differentiating addition to Sysomos’ portfolio of services. I do think they need to answer the privacy questions, though.

What’s your take?


Posted in: measurement, monitoring, social media, tools

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Altimeter, Web Analytics Demystified Release New Research On Social Media Measurement

10.04.23

Measurement is one of the most interesting areas within social media right now. Not only is effective measurement critical to demonstrating results in an emerging space, but sophisticated measurement can offer valuable insights to shape communications strategies, both online and off; proactive and reactive. This challenge is being compounded as the social web expands beyond companies’ websites and individual networks with Facebook’s new announcements.

While smart people like Katie Payne have been working hard to nail down effective measurement approaches, there’s a long way to go as social media continue to shift and evolve. So, a 26-page white paper released by Altimeter Group and Web Analytics Demystified, with the input of some of the major players in this emerging industry, offers some much-needed insight into the problems and potential solutions we’re all facing in this area.

The paper offers steps for companies to follow in their measurement efforts:

  1. Revisit tradition for solid innovation: Follow traditional business and communications best practices – align success metrics with business objectives and measure against those
  2. Make learning your primary goal: Make continuous improvement a key goal, and take advantage of the opportunity to gain insights from your customers
  3. Define requirements first, then select vendors: Develop your measurement approach THEN figure out which company’s solution to use
  4. Develop your social media measurement playbook: Get the organization on the same page with regard to goals, objectives, expectations and actions of your social media efforts. Then implement the technologies and processes you need to measure against that
  5. Make our measurement framework your own: Adapt generic models to suit your organisation, as there’s no “one size fits all” solution

The paper also provides a simple framework for considering the key performance indicators (KPIs) that you may want to consider in your efforts:

This is a rudimentary list of business objectives, but provides a useful starting point for discussion. Like Shel Holtz, I’d like to see more discussion of this in a future iteration.

The KPI discussion, meanwhile, is excellent, providing simple explanations of each metric along with practical ways to measure against them and pointers to vendors who can help organizations in measuring against those factors.

In summary, this white paper provides some extremely valuable insight into some of the measurement context, challenges and solutions companies face. It’s worth a read for the business objective and KPIs section alone. I should also note that unlike many other similar organizations, Altimeter is providing this white paper free of charge (thanks!), and for that reason I’m able to embed it below.

If you haven’t checked the paper out yet, I strongly recommend you do so. You’ll certainly get more than your money’s worth :)

What do you think of the report?

Altimeter Report: Social Marketing Analytics


 

Posted in: best practices, measurement, social media, social media monitoring

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Shift From Self-Driven To Issue-Driven Social Media Listening

10.03.31

Are you focusing on the wrong things in your monitoring program?

Yesterday, I was impressed to discuss the following assertion from a company we’re hoping to work with, regarding their monitoring program (paraphrased below):

“We don’t just want more reading material; we want something that adds value to what we do.”

This one statement evolved into a valuable conversation on the difference between self-focused monitoring and a more holistic program focused not just on the organization but also on the issues that matter more broadly to the company.

The nature of self-focused monitoring

It seems obvious, but there’s an important distinction here. Many organizations focus on what other people are saying about them without broadening their focus to the things that really matter to them:

  • How many people are talking about us?
  • Are they saying nice things?
  • Where are they talking?
  • What kinds of things are they associating with us?
  • Are our organization’s key messages mentioned?

Benefits of self-focused monitoring

These programs are often used as yardsticks for determining the success of online programs and there’s certainly value in that. Self-driven monitoring can help both from a communications and a broader business perspective, for example:

  • Catch emerging issues related to your company or brands
  • Identify opportunities for product/service improvement (valuable research for product teams)
  • Spotting pent-up demand or frustration early
  • Provide an additional channel for proactive customer customer service
  • Assist with the evaluation of communications programs

Despite these benefits, though, self-driven monitoring only scratches the surface of the potential for monitoring.

Opportunities beyond “self”

Still, there’s so much more to online monitoring than this. Monitoring and listening programs focused purely on a company can miss much of the potential insight for the company.

  • What about emerging industry topics?
  • What about discussion of your competitors?
  • What about monitoring for hot-button media issues?
  • What about looking for what key voices (policy makers, for example) are saying about your industry?
  • What about broader consumer insights related to your market?

There’s a wealth of valuable information being discussed online nowadays; the limits of the potential usefulness are to a great extent only defined by your internal resources (time and people or, if outsourced, budget). With the right program, you can move from reactive, passive evaluation to proactive, real-time insights and actionable take-aways.

The most comprehensive monitoring programs define their sphere of conversation broadly, then dig into specific aspects for actionable insights – research, leads, media opportunities and so on. It is programs such as these, which can constantly evolve to incorporate emerging topics and trends, that realize the full value of the powerful tools out there (Radian6, Sysomos, Alterian SM2, Scout Labs etc) for mining these online conversations.

So, ask yourself: is there room to evolve the way you approach your social media monitoring?

Posted in: social media, social media monitoring

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Radian6 Launches Real-Time Monitoring And Engagement Console

10.03.10

Radian6 has announced a new tool that has the potential to be a paradigm shift in how companies manage their social media monitoring programs.

The Radian6 Engagement Console combines two of the best tools out there – Tweetdeck and Radian6 – in an Adobe Air-based desktop tool. In doing so, the console makes radical improvements to the workflow process for Radian6 users. We’ve been test-driving the console in our office for a little while now, and I’ve been very impressed by the utility – and future potential – of this new tool.

The Low-Down

Some of the key features of the console:

  • Supports multiple Twitter accounts and Facebook, so you can combine your personal and professional engagement – posting and replying on both of these services
  • Allows you to set up “stacks” (as they call columns) from multiple Radian6 profiles, based on numerous criteria
  • Incorporates Radian6’s search functionality, pulling from searches covering blogs, Twitter, Google Buzz, forums, Flickr, YouTube and more
  • Far, far faster than the Radian6 web interface – both in terms of interaction but also refresh frequency, which can be as frequent as every 30 seconds
  • Supports conversation threading – a feature missing from Radian6 previously
  • Built-in URL shortener
  • Allows team-wide collaboration on engagement, as you can see updates from colleagues in near-real time and can view previous conversations with people
  • Resizeable columns (hear that, Tweetdeck??)
  • Incorporates all of Radian6’s workflow features within the tool
  • Allows you to create custom macros for bulk management of posts.

Check out Radian6 CEO Marcel Lebrun discussing the console in this video:

Workflow At Your FingerTips

These last two features are central to the console’s value. One of the biggest barriers to using the full potential of the Radian6 workflow has, in the past, been the slow speed of the web interface and the 15-minute refresh cycle within that interface. This, combined with the preference people for tools such as Tweetdeck for their own personal posts, makes it hard to ensure that messages all flow through one system from a workflow perspective. This all changes with the Engagement Console.

The Engagement Console is intended for use as a front-line tool. In contrast, the Radian6 web interface is built much more around its reporting functionality. By taking the popular layout of Tweetdeck, building-in Radian6 data and workflow, and also essentially co-opting many of the features that have made tools like Hootsuite and CoTweet popular for team-based approaches recently, Radian6 is releasing a tool that has the potential to dramatically ease the monitoring and engagement process for companies.

Of course, the web interface remains for report generation purposes – this tool is intended as an addition, not a replacement.

Macros are your friend

The macro feature is another very cool addition. Macros aim to streamline your interactions by letting you automate recurring tasks. So, if you have a type of post that frequently comes up, you can set a standard way of dealing with them, save it as a macro and then click one button to handle all of that post’s workflow actions.

Confusing? Imagine a macro for product complaints, for example. You could create a macro that sets sentiment to ‘negative’, sets the post classification to ‘product complaint’, adds a post tag of “support” and assigns posts to a particular team member. Then, when future complaints arise, you can click the macro and all of that is taken care of in one click.

Bottom line

The Radian6 Engagement Console really could be a game-changer in their market. It combines the powerful search, workflow and team functionality of Radian6 with an easy-to-use interface which is a front-line person’s dream come true. Given all of the relatively similar social media monitoring services out there, this tips the balance. Once this tool rolls out fully (it’s in private beta until April), I see no reason why companies looking for both social media analytics and real-time engagement wouldn’t choose Radian6.

Now, where’s that mobile app…?

Posted in: monitoring, social media monitoring, tools

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Review: Sysomos Social Media Monitoring Tool

09.11.30

I’ve explored many social media monitoring tools over the last few years. This week I added to the list when I received a demo of Sysomos – a Toronto-based company launched in 2007. Along with Radian6 and the Alterian-acquired Techrigy, Sysomos is one of the well-known players in the monitoring landscape right now.

Sysomos’ offerings are split into two products (see a detailed breakdown on the Sysomos website):

  • Maps – Sysomos’ core tool – offering unlimited search queries and analysis on its database of conversations.
  • Heartbeat – Sysomos’ enterprise-level tool, incorporating search, analysis and workflow management around specific topics.

I’ve structured this review to around the major features I look for in a monitoring tool:

  • Search
  • Analysis features
  • Workflow
  • Price

Search

Historical search

Both Sysomos tools query the same database of conversations, which stretches back to 2006. All users can run queries on this entire database (historical data in the Heartbeat tool comes with an additional cost), which solves a problem I’ve frequently encountered in the past – being able to look back in time to run baseline and historical searches for new clients.

Boolean

Sysomos also allows the creation of boolean searches – a feature I welcome as it allows the creation of complex queries very easily.

Social networks

To my surprise, Sysomos didn’t seem to search the full breadth of social networks we’ve come to expect. When we asked about searching MySpace, for example, we were told that we could find MySpace if we searched for “specific users.”

With that said, Sysomos does include public Facebook pages and groups in its search results. Other tools (Techrigy, for example) do this too, but it’s a useful feature that’s becoming more important as Facebook continues to dominate other social networks (in North America, at least).

Organization

One area in which Sysomos does fall slightly short of its competitors is in the organization of queries. Whereas Radian6 allows hierarchies of queries, so you can separate searches for your competitors from those for your brand, for example.

Analysis features

Interface

The interface on Sysomos products was one of the big eye-openers for me. Long frustrated with interfaces that limit your options, I was pleased to see a very user-friendly dashboard which allows easy on-the-fly customization. Need to narrow your search duration? Just click and drag over a time period on a chart and it adjusts.

Sentiment

Sysomos comes with automated sentiment analysis. I’m a long-time cynic when it comes to this kind of feature. Companies seem to view it as almost a must-have nowadays but I’m not sure why when no-one is able to produce an accurate tool. Sysomos claims its sentiment analysis is 80 per cent accurate, but I’m afraid a 20% error margin is not good enough for me.

With that said, you can manually edit the sentiment assigned to results, and even a mere 80 per cent accuracy does mean less work for the person analyzing the data, so while I don’t consider the sentiment analysis a differentiator, it’s still handy.

Filtering

The filtering system in Sysomos is very simple and flexible. You can layer new filters on top of your search at any time, and it’s easy to add those filters onto your main search permanently if you want to.

Segmentation

While the deep mining doesn’t seem to be quite as powerful as in some other tools, the breadth of options is wider – allowing deeper analysis on geography and a limited demographic breakdown (based on user-disclosed information).

Text analysis

While word clouds are run-of-the-mill nowadays, Sysomos goes one step further through what it calls its “BuzzGraph”, which shows the associations between common words in a search. I found the context provided by BuzzGraph to be a welcome addition to the rudimentary text analysis provided by most services.

Workflow

Maps, as a search/analysis focused offering, doesn’t include a workflow system. Heartbeat, however, does. It incorporates the standard features we’ve come to expect, including task assignments. However, from the brief look I got, it doesn’t seem to go as far as Radian6’s workflow tool, which incorporates deeper categorization of posts, tagging and real-time email alerts.

Price

Sysomos doesn’t come cheap. However, it’s roughly comparable with its competitors.

The Heartbeat tool starts at $500 per month, plus a $500 setup fee. For that you get a limited number of searches and access by up to five people. For double that fee, you can double the number of queries  and get access by an unlimited number of people.

The Maps tool, meanwhile, comes at a flat rate of $2,500 per month. That allows unlimited searches on all data going back to 2006, and unlimited access, making it a potentially cost-effective tool for agencies servicing multiple clients.

Conclusion

I was very impressed with Sysomos. In particular:

  • The flexibility of the user interface is a big plus;
  • Filtering and segmentation tools combine to be a powerful analysis tool;
  • Different products for both corporate and agency needs.

If this has piqued your interest, check out the Sysomos website or their blog, and check out the video earlier in the post for an overview.

Posted in: monitoring, social media, social media monitoring

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Brands In Public: A New Reputation Management Tool

09.09.23

If your company matters to people, they are talking about you.

There’s nothing particularly new about this; this has been the pattern for hundreds of years. However, one difference with the advent of social media tools is that people are now able to talk to dozens, hundreds or thousands of other people instead of the few they used to.

There are plenty of tools to help companies listen to what people are saying. While I often talk about Radian6, there are plenty of other tools out there, both free and professional.

Today Seth Godin’s Squidoo launched a new service named Brands In Public.

As Seth says:

“You can’t control what people are saying about you. What you can do is organize that speech. You can organize it by highlighting the good stuff and rationally responding to the not-so-good stuff. You can organize it by embracing the people who love your brand and challenging them to speak up and share the good word. And you can respond to it in a thoughtful way, leaving a trail that stands up over time.”

Brands In Public provides an online dashboard that pulls together the latest news and conversation about a brand from sources such as Google Blogsearch, Google News, Yahoo! News, Twitter, BackType, Google Search Trends and Quantcast.

Where Brands In Public gets more interesting is that if a company decides it wants to sponsor its company page (for $400 a month) it gets control of about 2/3 of the screen real-estate on the page. It can highlight blog posts, run contests, post videos or whatever it likes. In case of an issue, the company can quickly respond without needing any technical skills, the ongoing maintenance requirements of a blog, or IT’s go-ahead to create a new page on your website.

All the time, the regular searches continue in the right-hand column, uncensored and unfiltered.

So, while the Molson page features a Twitter search, the Molson blog and a quick poll on how people feel about the brand, the Allstate page includes YouTube videos from various channels along with content from multiple blogs (disclosure: Molson Coors Canada is a recent client; Allstate Canada is a current client).

There’s nothing complicated about Brands In Public; in fact Seth takes pain in his post announcing the service to note that it’s deliberately simple. “It’s simply a place for your brand to see and be seen, to organize and to respond.”

A few thoughts from me:

  • The interface is clean, friendly and easy to use.
  • Right now there’s no search function – the pages seem to be limited to a scrolling list. Presumably this will change as the service is built out and the volume of pages increases.
  • The FAQs indicate that the service will remove a company’s page if they request it. However, as they note, “Your fans might be disappointed though.” What’s more, the lack of a comprehensive list of companies may inhibit the growth of the service.
  • If brands haven’t yet invested in a social media presence, they’re unlikely to make this their first step due to the lack of control of the searches. To those who have already invested, they don’t need this presence as they’re already out there.
  • Brands In Public provides an easy way for companies to be part of the conversation – an entry level solution – but at a premium price. As TechCrunch noted, $400 per month is a pretty hefty price point for a series of automated searches and a few dashboard modules.

What do you think? Is this a useful tool for brands?

Posted in: monitoring, social media, tools

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Build Your Social Media Strategy With Rocks and Sand

09.09.18

Social media is taking off right now. It’s all over the traditional media; there are books on it being released in every direction, and everyone seems to be on at least one of the various social networks, be it Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace or any other.

Meanwhile, from a business perspective it feels like every company we talk to is at least including social media in its plans; in many cases it’s front and centre.

Some of those companies immediately look for the “quick wins” – campaigns that will get them immediate bang for their buck. In those cases. it can be difficult to explain what I believe to be the truth:

Quick wins are difficult in social media and it’s often ill-advised to seek them. Social media works best as a long-term initiative.

Can of stonesWe occasionally use (and wreck) a ‘rocks and sand’ metaphor when thinking about social media. You can have a jar full of rocks in it, but there are lots of gaps. To truly full it, you need sand to fill them. Social media is similar – you can have lots of big campaigns, but for your efforts to truly pay off you need the ’sand’ – the long-term foundation that keeps everything in place.

What is that foundation? It’s the infrastructure you build – the policies, training and workflow that keeps things running smoothly. It’s the executive support that lets you move beyond a publicity-based approach. It’s the listening program that lets you identify issues early and learn from ongoing conversation. It’s the ongoing presence that gives you the credibility to maximize those short-term pushes.

Bottom line: it’s the fundamentals.

Try to push ahead with your ‘big rocks’ without the ’sand’ and you’ll come up short, with holes in your plans.

(Image: Shutterstock)

Posted in: best practices, social media

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Scaling Issues In Social Media Monitoring

09.09.09

Radian6 recently introduced a few new features to its social media monitoring platform. The company  explained them well on the Radian6 blog so I won’t go into details, but in a nutshell:

  • You can change font sizes on widgets
  • You can segment trend charts by media type, language and region
  • You can now copy and move reporting widgets between dashboards and users

These are minor changes for a product that is constantly evolving. The first change is very minor and the second is a step in the right direction. The third, however,  signals a continued trend of Radian6 offering features designed to improve collaboration among teams.

Volume and coordination are big challenges for large companies. As more and more large companies adopt social media, workflow features are becoming increasingly crucial to this kind of tool.  For social media monitoring to make it at an enterprise level, tools like Radian6 need to continue to add features that deal with scale.

In the meantime, here are five tips for scaling your listening:

  1. Sampling – when large volumes of discussion mean that reviewing every search result is completely unfeasible, consider sampling a percentage of posts. If there are 500 a day, perhaps you look at 50 or 100 of them. Statistically, you should get an accurate sample.
  2. Rank by influence – most of the major social media monitoring tools offer ways to rank or sort posts by various measures of influence. You may consider ’skimming’ the most influential posts from the top of the pile, and dealing with those that have traction before moving through the list.
  3. Automation – I’m resistant to automated analysis, especially around sentiment (the English language is so complex), but in cases of massive scale, there may be no alternative but to allow some level of automation.
  4. Workflow - processes are helpful within organizations of any size, but within large organizations they are critical. Lay out who is responsible on given days or at given times; what the process is for monitoring and (if necessary) responding; a triage process to help determine what requires action; all of the decision points that arise through the process. It can drastically cut the time needed to deal with individual online discussions.
  5. Pull Together a Team - at a certain point, you can no longer do it all yourself. Check out Amber Naslund’s excellent ebook on building a social media team for a fantastic resource on how to pull together the resources you need to scale up.

How have you dealt with scaling issues in social media monitoring? What other features would you like to see in monitoring tools to make that scaling easier?

Posted in: monitoring, social media monitoring

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A Quick Social Media Analysis Of The Toronto Storm

09.08.21

If you lived anywhere in Southern Ontario or were paying attention online last night, you’ll likely know that the Toronto area experienced a brief but violent storm early yesterday evening. What made Torontonians sit up and notice was the dozen or so tornado warnings issued for the area as the storm rolled in.

For a while, the words “Toronto” and “Tornado” trended on Twitter as people relayed news and their tales of the storms.

Here’s a video of the storm rolling-in across Toronto (you may want to turn your speakers down):

Jim Parsons also has several fantastic photos.

I pulled together a brief analysis of events as they unfolded during last night’s episode, using Radian6 and a couple of other tools. It’s quick and dirty but, well, that’s what you get for free :)

Timing

As weather stations forecast the storm earlier in the day, there was a brief spike in conversation in the morning. Conversation related to the tornadoes themselves began to erupt around 6pm – the first time that, had you been paying attention to conversation trends, you would have noticed a trend evolving.

Another noticeable feature is the second spike in conversation later in the evening. The storm was well away from Toronto by this point; this spike represented people discussing their experiences and posting photos and videos they had collected during the episode.

Volume trend for 'Tornado' and 'Storm'

Volume and velocity

Once the storm began, the velocity of the spike in conversations was significant. We saw an immediate 66% increase in the volume of conversations about Toronto; at the height of the conversation (once the storm had passed, funnily enough), the volume represented more than a 125% increase in the converastion about Toronto.

Meanwhile, from one or two posts an hour about Toronto and storms or tornadoes, we saw an increase to roughly one post per minute during the storm, and two posts per minute in the aftermath.

Trend of Toronto and storm-topic keywords

Media Types

Not surprisingly, with Twitter being the golden child of the moment, especially for time-sensitive updates, micromedia comprised almost three-quarters of the conversation relating to tornadoes. Blogs made up 13 per cent, while images captured by people comprised 10 per cent of the conversation.

This is a substantial departure from the day as a while, during which nearly 40 per cent of the conversation about Toronto occured on blogs and a similar amount occurred on Twitter. A useful reminder that while Twitter is high-profile, on a day-to-day basis much conversation happens elsewhere.

Putting the storm into perspective over the course of the day gives an interesting slant to things. While it’s headline news today and was during the night, mentions of the storm and of tornadoes comprise a small segment of the conversations regarding Toronto yesterday. Despite the storm, discussion around the Jays/Sox game garnered almost as much overall discussion.

What are your memories of the storm?

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