Social Media Monitoring

Social Media Monitoring Dieter Fensel, Birgit Leiter, IoannisStavrakantonakis

Social Media Monitoring Overview • Introduction • What is Social Media Monitoring? • Why do we need the SMM? • Available media channels • Core Features of the SMM tools • SMM tools available in the market • Next Step: Response! • Summary

Introduction • Given the increasingly large number of consumers using social media, enterprises cannot ignore the power that is weaved within its networks. • They need to be • Present in the relevant communication channels • Aware of what is discussed about their products and services Therefore Social Media Monitoring is indispensible • Social Media Monitoring Tools enable enterprises to have access to real customers’ opinions, complains and questions at real time in a highly scalable way.

What is Social Media Monitoring? Definition* Social Media Monitoring is the continuoussystematic observation and analysis of social media networks and social communities. It supports a quick overview and insight into topics and opinions on the social web. *http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Media#Monitoring

What is Social Media Monitoring? • SMM tools facilitate the listening of what people say about various topics in the social media sphere (blogs, twitter, facebook, etc.) • Listening: is active, focused, concentrated attention for the purpose of understanding the meanings expressed by a speaker. • Hearing: is an accidental and automatic brain response to sound that requires no effort. Are you listening?

What is Social Media Monitoring? • Harness the wealth of information available online in the form of user-generated content • These tools offer means for listening to the social media users, analyzing and measuring their activity in relation to a brand or enterprise • Offer access to real customers’ opinions, complaints and questions, in real time, in a highly scalable way

What is Social Media Monitoring? The Social Media Monitoring (SMM) tools are NOT Social Media Dashboard tools. Their goal is NOT to administrate your social media accounts. But, their goal is to ENABLE YOU TO LISTEN towhat is being said about certain topics on the web.

Why do we need the SMM? • “The direct, unfiltered, brutally honest nature of much online discussion is gold dust to big companies that want to spot trends, or find out what customers really think of them.” • The Economist, March 2006 • “As control of a brand’s marketing messages—and, indeed, its very image—migrates from traditional media to social media, companies need to become increasingly adept at paying attention to how they're being perceived in the online world.” • The Aberdeen Group, February 2008

Why do we need the SMM? • Provide valuable insight from the side of enterprises regarding which strategy they should employ • Determine the most effective and ineffective offered features of an enterprise

Why do we need the SMM? • The speed at which one can investigate a topic of interest, which greatly exceeds that of a traditional survey approach. • Social Media Monitoring is more precise, faster and more economical than traditional expert panel analysis. • Information is conveyed to someone who can absorb, process and formulate a response – it’s really hearing vs. listening.

Why do we need the SMM? • Reputation management • Event detection, issue and crisis management • Competitor analysis • Trend and market research plus campaign monitoring • Influencer detection and customer relationship management • Product and innovation management • Manage Word of mouth

Channels to analyze • Social networks, e.g.: • Facebook (Q1 2012): • 526 million daily active users • 3.2 billion Likes and Comments per day • 500K comments per minute • 700K status updates per minute • 80K wall posts per minute

Channels to analyze • Social networks, e.g.: • Twitter: • 200 million Tweets per day (2011) • 200K Tweets per minute • LinkedIn: 147 million users • Google+: 170 million users

Channels to analyze • Sharing networks, e.g.: • YouTube: • 4 billion videos are viewed a day • 100 million people take a social action on YouTube every week (likes, shares, comments, etc) • Flickr: >6.500 new photos per minute • Pinterest: • 13 million users • American users spend an average of 97.8 minutes

Channels to analyze • Email lists • 2172 million Email users • 3375 million Active email accounts • 2.8 million emails per second • 90 trillion emails per year

Channels to analyze • Group Communication and Message Boards (e.g. Google Groups, Yahoo! Groups, Facebook Groups, etc.) • Forums: 2K posts per minute • Yahoo! Groups: • 9 million groups • 113 million users • 933 thousand unique visitors daily

Channels to analyze • News feeds • Total Feeds*: 694,311 • Atom Feeds*: 86,496 • RSS feeds*: 438,102 (63% of the total) *source: http://www.syndic8.com

Channels to analyze • Blogs: • >95 million blogs available online • 22K posts per minute • Tumblr(Q2 2012): • 55.9 Million blogs • 23.3 Billion posts • 20K posts per minute • WordPress(Q2 2012) • 73.724.911 WordPress sites

Channels to analyze • Traditional mediums: • TV: • 365 TV channels licensed in Germany • Radio: • 822 Radio stations in Germany • Print mediums (newspapers, magazines) • 382 Daily newspapers in Germany • 4180 Weekly magazines in Germany

Channels to analyze • Online News: • News websites: >25.000 • Online radio stations: >2700 Online radio stations in Germany

Available media channels FORUMS/NEWSGROUPS MICROBLOGS VIDEO SHARING The Conversation SOCIAL NETWORKS WIKIS SOCIAL MEDIA NEWS AGGREGATORS PHOTO SHARING MAINSTREAM MEDIA BLOGS

Social Media Monitoring

Available media channels How many people would you need to manage the chaos of social media activity and extract valuable insights for your brand?

Core Features of the SMM tools A Social Media Monitoring tool should support the following core features: • Listening grid • Data analysis • Sentiment analysis • Historical data • Dashboard

Listening grid SMMs should be able to gather data from many sources and in different forms (e.g. posts, pictures, videos) and establish a listening grid to capture such data. • The listening grid focuses on three main aspects: • The channels that are monitored (e.g. blogs and micro-blogs, social networks, video and image websites, etc.); • Which countries and languages the tools provide support for; and • The topics relevant to the enterprise. Additionally, the listening grid should send alerts to inform clients (e.g. when post volume increases over a defined threshold or sentiment be-comes very negative).

Data analysis • Having established a listening grid that captures data and posts around the topics the user is interested in, the next step is to analyze the data and produce actionable reports and insights for the user of the tool. • The analysis is ofparticular importance as it encompasses the methods used to both filter the gathered data of unwanted information (e.g. spam, duplicates) and to process it in a way that is meaningful for the enterprise. The analysis should provide: • Brand monitoring and reputation management • Consumer segmentation, customer insight and market research • Identify specific conversations to join • Gather information about competitors • Support product and service development

Sentiment analysis • The effort of finding valuable information in user-generated data is called opinion mining. Sentiments are determined using elements of computational linguistics, text analytics, and machine learning elements, such as latent semantic analysis, support vector machines, Natural Language Processing. • Main purpose is measuring the attitude, opinion, emotional state, or intended emotional communication of a speaker or writer. • A sentiment score can be extremely useful in evaluating a large data set of social brand mentions, as well as allow enterprises to filter content based on positive or negative comments, thus isolating the themes or issues that have determined the developed sentiment.

Sentiment analysis • The major method of extracting sentiment from user generated content is Natural Language Processing (NLP). Sometimes called text analytics, data mining or computational linguistics, NLP refers to the computerized process of automatically analyzing the meaning of human language. • Pros: The automatic techniques are tireless, fast, consistent (they do not make random errors), and can be improved over time. They offer comparable results to humans in real world scenarios. • Cons: Automated sentiment technology cannot reach the quality of a human annotator.

Historical data • The user has access only to captured data about topics that he has requested to monitor. Thus, he should proactively monitor topics in order to recognize problems and new opportunities. • Access to previously captured data is required in order to compare the current metrics and reports related to the monitored topic with any previous state of it. It is necessary to understand the improvement of a strategy in the long-run and through the years.

Historical data • Exploit the historical data of your monitoring process in order to figure out the strong points of your company throughout the years and the points that hinder the further development. • Measure the impact of your various online marketing campaigns, compare them and modify them in a productive way. • Discover actionable insights based on the overall image of the enterprise and act in the appropriate way.

Dashboard • A user interface that organizes and presents information in a manner that is easy to read and use. • Quickly captures the big picture of your monitored topics or your brand. • Offers users graphical representation of the raw data in the form of charts, listings, and historical graphing of queries and phrases. • Should be customizable to the needs of the client and provide a wide range of visualization tools. • Present information about demographics, trend topics aroundthe monitored subject and insights in an actionable way.

SMM tools available in the market Commercial Tools • Alterian SM2 • Brandwatch • Converseon • Cymfony Maestro • evolve24 Mirror • Media Metrics socialMeme • MeltwaterBuzz • NM Incite My BuzzMetrics • Radian6 • Sysomos • Visible Technologies Intelligence

SMM tools available in the market Alterian SM2 • Storyboard report Implements the Dashboard concept. A lot of effort is taken to encapsulate SM2 data into consumable, easy-to-understand results. This new Storyboard report gives users an infographics-like report that is easily exportable. • Alerting Users can set threshold-based alerts whenever overall volume or sentiment changes by specific numbers or percentages as compared to a previous time period. When an alert is initiated, the user will be emailed of the notification with the pertinent information and a quick link into SM2 with the relevant report details.

SMM tools available in the market Alterian SM2 • Historical data Extensive Social Media Warehouse with historical data containing over 20 billion social media mentions, blogs, tweets, posts, images and conversations. This data includes in-depth information for each search result, including 36 types of data ranging from the date of publication to the physical location of the content creator. • Sentiment Analysis Providesword parsing, weighting, proximity and Natural Language Processing to enable the most accurate and customizable sentiment analysis.

SMM tools available in the market Brandwatch • Gathering Data They have built a large, distributed Crawler – a program which, similarly to how Google searches the Web, goes and visit websites from all around the world. But, visits the web in near-real time! • Cleaning Data From adverts and navigation text, spam, dates (you can accurately filter your brand’s mentions by date range, and do not see mentions dating from one year ago!), duplicates, loose query definition: most of the time, a brand’s name is too generic to provide relevant results (think Orange or Next). To address this their query definition engine supports advanced query definition syntax, including some special fields which allow for far more accurate query setups. • AnalysingData (Sentiment analysis, query matching) • Presenting Data (Dashboard, API)

SMM tools available in the market Brandwatch • Crawler database • Multiple crawlers • Distributed scalable architecture • Spam filter • Change detection • Title extraction • Content extraction • Meta-data extraction • Query matching • Sentiment analysis • Topic extraction • Mention storage • Text storage • Text index • Distributed scalable architecture • User Interface • API

SMM tools available in the market MediaMetricssocialMeme • Monitoring Monitoring of over 100 million online sources in 48 languages as well as TV and radio from a single source. TV and Radio content is transformed automatically into written content which is searched through and analyzed. • Analysis Articles are analyzed to identify mutual influences and quantify effects of opinion leaders. Influential authors, sources and stakeholders are identified. Means to measure the impact of the campaigns. • Dashboard The tool is web-based and provides an overview of the themes landscape via a user interface. You can evaluate your communication in comparison to that of your competitors.

SMM tools available in the market Radian6 • Radian6 Analysis Regarding the listening, you can choose what channels to monitor, which countries and languages you are interested in to listen to and the most important of all, what would you like to listen to and which are the hot topics for you. • Radian6 Insights Helps you to go beyond the discovery of posts to uncover true social actionable insights in real-time. • Summary Dashboard Monitor the health of your brand on the social web in one convenient, pre-configured application with the Radian6 Summary Dashboard. In one easy-to-read view, learn more about the volume, overall sentiment, key demographics, influencers and more around your brand, product or competition.

SMM tools available in the market Radian6 • Engagement Console The solution to scaling social media engagement across your organization. This desktop application helps your company listen, engage, and measure your outreach across teams and departments. • Mobile iPhone app Information today moves faster than ever before, and since the social web doesn’t stop when you’re away from your desk, you need to remain aware of the conversations around your brand at all times. • API and extensions additional flexibility to the social data pulled from Insights and the Engagement Console through our API and integrations with external applications • >3,000 clients – including over half of the Fortune 100 companies

SMM tools available in the market Social Media Monitoring Market The available Social MediaMonitoring tools that are available in the market have been reviewedby various organizations and marketing research laboratories. The SMMs come in differentshapes and sizes in order to fulfill the requirements of potentialconsumers of their services. Most of the tools cover the core features that have been presentedin the previous slides. Source: Forrester ResearchListening platforms Q3 ‘10

SMM tools available in the market Free Tools • Addict-o-matic • Boardreader • Google Alerts • HyperAlerts • Klout • Netvibes • Social Mention • Trackur • Twazzup • WhosTalkin • Yahoo Pipes • Pros: • Cost-efficient alternative • Cons: • Limited reports • Limited channel-coverage • Limited functionality (e.g. workflow management, dashboard)

SMM tools available in the market Disadvantages of free tools • Free tools are free of support service. • There is no guarantee concerning the availability of the service. • Functions are often limited to quantitative/statistical reports. • Complex analysis (e.g. automated sentiment detection) may not be available for languages other than English. • Many are point solutions considering few or only one platform (e.g. Twitter). • Services that claim to search the entire web do not reveal which sources are • really included. • To get a comprehensive overview several free services must be • combined. • Results of free tools have to be saved and archived in user-defined structures and formats. • Workflow-functionality is usually not available.

Social Media Monitoring Multi- Channel Publishing Response Social Media Monitoring

Next Step: Response! Response! Engage! • Customers need answers to their questions and you need to defend your brand on the negative comments in the social web sphere. • By being authentic, transparent, and operating with integrity, you will successfully engage your market and a build community of advocates who will spread your message virally in your market. • The engagement concept refers to the ability of the tool to support reaction with the social media posts. Many tools today offer the integrated possibility to reply to posts and follow up to any mention, complaint or question that is needed or has some opportunities.

Social Media Monitoring