Wednesday, February 13, 2008

The Hunter vs the fisherman - Part 2

The futility of chasing your content around the web (the hunter) means another approach is required. I've previously mentioned that the trawling (fisherman) analogy is far more apt and others have used this before (thanks Jeremiah)

So how do you go about casting your net to find out where your company information is scattered online?

  • You can use search engines such as Google/Yahoo/MSN etc.

  • You can use sites specific to your industry/vertical etc

  • You can check user-generated media aggregators such as Technorati etc.

However, I was recently made aware of a tool called Brandwatch, a tool that tracks a wide range of various sources (news, blogs, etc.) and measures the mentions of a brand and its sentiment, as well as the source. I'm impressed with this product and think that it provides a really useful way to categorise a significant part of the Blogosphere and other public opinion forums.

Cymphony's Orchestra product is also a clever tool that "integrates innovative Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology with expert analysis to identify the people, issues and trends impacting your business"... although I've yet to see how it works...

The evolution of the trawlerman for discovering the collective sentiment has started.....

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Have you used any of those service? to monitor buzz or social mentions of your company?

Hayden Sutherland said...

Tristan

I’ve not used any online PR measurement tools to monitor the buzz about Ideal Interface, primarily because we’re not large enough to have much of a collective sentiment yet (but you can hope).

I’ve used similar services in the past to those I have mentioned and we’re currently working with one client who is using the services of TNS (Cymphony’s parent).

Contact me directly for more details

Hayden

P B said...

Interesting article, Hayden, especially because it talks about tools that monitor blogs, forums and other social media occurrences of a particular brand. I haven't tried Brandwatch or Cymfony's solution. From what I have seen about them on their web pages, they look and sound good.

However, I find a couple of features missing from these solutions but I could be biased toward a tool called 247tweetview (and Mark Kobayashi-Hillary's written about this on The SocialITe at http://www.computerweekly.com/blogs/social-business/2010/03/customers-want-you-247.html)that monitors Twitter for negative and positive customer sentiment about a brand and then delivers Insights that are actionable recommendations for these businesses that WILL (and that's a guarantee, which is why the block letters) stem negative sentiment in real time. Now, Twitter claims a sizable chunk of all social media activity across demographics and the solution lets businesses harness the power of social media to create positive sentiment and perception about their brand.

If you need to know more, after the preliminary research, of course, feel free to post a response to this.

Thanks!