Free (or cheap) online monitoring dashboards - Infographic

I was prompted to take another look at the free (or cheepish to a point) tools you can use to monitor brands online having read a blog post by Steve Farnsworth from a year ago on this subject. There have been a number of new entrants to this space in recent months and I found that it is now possible to do some very accurate and cheap monitoring, particularly  if you only receive a small amount of coverage.

It seems to make a good subject for an infographic. I have taken a couple of the more established monitoring sources like Google Alerts and Yahoo Pipes and compared them with some the more recent entrants including Mention, Social Mention and Datasift. Note, this list is obviously not exhaustive and I would be very interested in any others you think might be of interest.

I am keen to look at Social Mention in greater detail as it does not seem to have a data limit; it does alerts and RSS as well as measures for sentiment, reach, strength and passion. Their Twitter pickup looks okay although the results page features only simple filters and could make workflow CRM a bit of a challenge. It might be better to apply the API to your own dashboard or use the RSS in one of the ways described at the bottom of this infographic.

Auto Sentiment Analysis Infographic

I have created this infographic to help summarise my experiences with auto sentiment analysis programs. I have used a few over the years and while they are getting better, they are far from perfect, and indeed are sometimes described as being no better than tossing a coin!

One peculiarity that I have noticed is that the sentiment engines which have undergone some form of sector-specific 'training' often seem to be more accurate.

For example I was checking some social media coverage on cigarettes and it was notable how poor the sentiment scoring was. Often the same tweet got re-tweeted with a different sentiment score. Then a week or so later I was looking at coverage on mobile phones and it was amazing how much more accurate the sentiment scoring was. Whereas in the first example I has changing possibly every other item, with the mobile phone sector it was more like one in every four items.

Ofgem come under social 'flack'

Listening to the news this morning it quickly became clear it was not going to be a good day for Ofgem - the governments watchdog for the UK energy market. They has announced that the energy firms were making about £125 a year from customers, instead of the more normal £15 per person. Aside from the technicalities of the energy market which is often portrayed as more broken than mended, why not let the social media reaction decide quite how the bad it is for Ofgem?

Using Brandwatch I looked at the social media exposure on Ofgem for the past 24 hours. The system collected almost 600 social media references, mostly being form news sites and Twitter. I would liked to have manually confirmed their sentiment rating, but as time is short and I don't half a day to spare for the exercise, I am working with their auto sentiment rating. Frankly I thought it might have been worse, but it is fair to describe it as pretty bad....48% negative, 50% neutral and 2% positive.

When things turn down should we take to the water?

One of the benefits of Media Evaluation Research being based where it is are the pleasant sea views from the office. Over the last few days there has be a succession of rather impressive speed boats and gin palaces heading up towards the North Sea and we wondered if they are going up to the London Boat Show which starts early next month?

Either way, it is an interesting indication that there are still people with the money to spend on these things. Obviously the bankers have not been hit that badly! While the day job involves finding ways to measure the media I am continually amazed at the selection of meaningful measures out there pointing towards the truth. At the moment a good indication of the downturn are the relative absence of cranes from the city horizon, or the fewer number of recently registered cars.

Measuring New Media

I recently did a talk for the Chartered Institute of Public Relations Strategy Conference on measurement. The PowerPoint slides are available via in the previous post. The brief for the talk was fairly broad and so as well as talking about the range of strategies and tactics for measuring traditional media, I went into some detail on measuring new media.

Although I hope the slides are of interest I thought they needed a little explanation and while I was writing up some explanatory notes I became side tracked and before I knew it had blossomed into a 1700 word mini-White Paper. If you are interested in taking a look this is the link to the paper.

Presentation to CIPR Strategy Conference

This is the presentation made to the CIPR's 'Prefecting PR Strategy' 27 October 2008. There are some notes which go with it so please come back to me or leave a comment and I will email them across. The conference lasted a one day and had over 50 middle and senior public relations practitioners in attendance.

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Sitting in on the infuence debate

In the world of online measurement it is easy to think of it as similar to traditional media (well similar) but with the additional necessity to measure influence. In traditional media influence is not such a major factor as the medium is finite in volume, with the individual media titles having their own discernible character against which influence can ascribed.

In social media this walled-garden has been thrown open to all comers. The result is a melting pot of unlimited dimensions. In a weeks time I am presenting on media research at the CIPR and central to the presentation is some pointers on the measurement of social media and crucially some discussion on the measurement of influence.

To quote Shel Israel it is not easy to measure. He makes the point that it is easy to mistake popularity for influence, largely because popularity of easier to measure. You can consider the number of comments and the level of engagement as an proxy for popularity. The challenge to PR in the future is find who has influence in the space they are working in. The process has to start with a concise understanding of which areas of the social media space are relevant to the market place.

A key PR skill is communication and needs to be combined with the ability to research the media market. I'm imagining that we need to get used to asking the question 'who are the key media players in this space?'. Everyone will have a different take on this and only after mapping the responses will we be able to appreciate how the lines of communication run, taking us a valuable step nearer to a picture of influence.

Keeping the human element on online measurement

One of the themes of this blog has been about preserving the human element in media measurement. Christie Adams makes this point very well in a recent posting.

Online is becoming a colourful playground for measurement products offering a multitude of instant results. If your requirements are purely quantitative then they are useful. If you want to consider qualitative factors then you must accept a element of human input, and the likely increase in cost and time.

Vision of the semantic web

Michael Marshall in evancarmichael.com explores some fascinating examples of implications of the increasing use of the semantic web. He explores the issues surrounding fraud, SOE and spamming, associated with tagging. Expect this to become a real issue soon as where new developments go, not far behind is someone trying to make a quick buck.

I was also very impressed with his view on tagging and truth/fact and its relative perception. The semantic web will rely on a sub-level of information providing an additional layer of information (through tags) in tandem with with web page information. In effect this information, or tags, tell the computer what the page 'means'. Michael Marshall makes the point that who is going to inspect the tags to make sure they are correct. This is very relevant to the measurement of online media.

While we should never expect perfect information; the hope is the semantic web will permit more accurate, intelligent searching and data interpretation. In the world of media measurement could this lead to computers undertaking more of the qualitative tasks we currently reserve for humans? This helps illustrate some of the challenges for auto-evaluation, and I hope undermines those who say they currently have an automated process for undertaking qualitative measurement.

Getting a pipe on social media measurement

Since discovering Yahoo Pipes a couple of months ago it has really been off my to-do-list. Whether I am progressing is debatable but there is a feeling that the bits are starting to form a shape, if not necessarily fitting together easily.

Following the news from the head of the stream I have been playing with Pipes to create an effective monitoring capacity, with some success. On the face of it it seems simple enough but the truth seems a little less clear. There are a selection of examples other have put together and as the general instructions are not so good it seems best to reverse engineer one of these.

In a future post I am planning to concentrate on one of the Pipe apps, Open Calais semantic tagging tool. Its a brilliant concept and with time I am determined to make use of it.

The other element I want to use is a Google Docs spreadsheet, which I understand can receive RSS feeds. Going right to the end of the 'food-chain' I also need some sort of admin. This might need to be custom derived using something like PHP / MySQL or Drupal(all about which I know very little).

The one thing I am determined to do is blog about the experience as these new tools and are all free and very current I hope it will useful information.

Customised semantic searching...free for all

These will be the best 'searches' you can get - forget confusion of double meaning words and searches which produce a load of gibberish. Yahoo! and others are working on producing a number of freely available tools which will permit all sorts of previously unheard of results.

Take Yahoo! Pipes. They have been around for a year or so and I have spent the last few days working out what it can do and how they work with other services. One of the modules is the semantic tag adding module form Open Calais which I have blogged about in the past. It is not quite there in accuracy (the Gnosis plugin seems to be more accurate?) but with a PHP output connected you have a really professional method of collecting web hits to rival almost any of the paid-for services out there. All you got to have is a bit of patience to knit it all together and customise the search functions. Pipes is really intuitive and once I watched a few tutorials on YouTube, found it quite straightforward and not at all daunting.

The tools for the measurement of social media are web hits and with the challenges this evaluation process presents you don't want to spend your time sifting irrelevant search results. All an analyst wants is a clean, relevant list of new coverage before setting to work deciding who has influence and what the content means. Don't rely on the semantic web (or any other computer system for that matter) to decide how good your coverage is, but when it comes to monitoring and low-level analysis it has a massive role to play.

Chinwag takes on Measurement

Interesting event organised by Chinwag dealing with the measurement of social media at Internet World yesterday. There was some disagreement over metrics (whats new) and how long it would take for the standards to be formalised behind which the industry will follow. There was a degree of the suppliers using it as an opportunity to pitch their wares, which was a shame, although with standardisation comes the possibility that their 'smoke and mirrors' (and expensive) wizz-bang box of tricks will become redundant.

Measurementcamp is a new concept and has be scheduled to kick off later this month, plus there is a wiki. All good developments and should be encouraged. What disappointed was the apparent poor turnout by the traditional media evaluations companies (why isn't someone from AMEC in the panel?). If there were some please correct me.

While at the event I attended the keynote talk by Andy Hobsbrawm from Agency.Com. It was a brilliant talk about the value of brands and the transfer of ownership - quite visionary.

PS - 'Pipex, life is hell without broadband - can I have it back please'