Social Media Monitoring - What raw data would we need to capture?

Lets imagine we are going to start monitoring social media for our brands, products and services. First thing we need to do is start listing to what people are saying. These conversation are the Raw Data we can collect and later analyze.

What do we need to capture from social media if we are going to monitor it?

The online conversations represented by:

1. Blog Posts + Comments/Discussions
2. Video + Comments/Discussions
3. Photos + Comments/Discussions
4. Bookmarks + Comments/Discussions
5. Micro Blogging (Tweets) + Replies
6. Activity Feeds
7. Product Reviews
8. Forum discussions

Where the conversation are happened:

1. On the web: the web site and perma-links – the website is also important so that we can give appropriate source credits and creative-commons statements when display content to the users of our website/service.
2. In the real-world: physical address / geo-location

Who participated in the conversation:

1. Who wrote the comment, post, etc
2. Who the post/comment was directed at/to
3. Location in the current thread

What relationship (friends, fans, etc) exist for each person involved in the conversation:

1. For each user account identified in the conversation collect the friending information from the current website. For example – When collecting bookmarks from Digg, we will also collect the user that create the bookmark and the friends of that user on Digg.

Conversation Topic & Tags:

1. Collected the topics, tags and categories that have been used to explicitly organize the conversation on the source website.

Hopeful the above list is a good starting point. Would love to hear what else would you collect if you wanted to monitor your brand within social media?

Social Media Monitoring Services - Part 6 - Others

There are many more services still to a look at. Here are a few more I've not yet had time to dig into:

1. Scout Labs
2. Sentimine
3. Top of Mind
4. TruCast

Social Media Monitoring Services - Part 5 - BrandIntel

Part 5 - BrandIntel
URL: http://www.brandintel.com/
Blog: -
Model: Custom Reports & Assessments
Target: Product Marketing & Corporate Marketing

Their pitch:
BrandIntel translates consumer-generated content into predictive consumer insight through a combination of proprietary technology, iterative human analysis and proven best practices.

Services and reports
BrandIntel reports enable clients to unlock the predictive value of consumer-generated content to help them make informed business decisions. Customers can choose from a variety of reports to suit their industry needs.

Reports cover any or all of four critical areas:

1. A broad overview of the market
2. Competitive benchmarking
3. A deep diagnostic of a particular business issue
4. Actionable recommendations

These reports can include:

Diagnostic evaluation
The Diagnostic Evaluation report provides insight into consumer sentiment from online discussions garnered from a broad-based scan of the Internet. It sets the basis for future research by providing a detailed assessment of the volume and nature of relevant brand discussion, and by pinpointing the data and communities that are relevant to a particular brand or category. The diagnostic provides direction on “what” consumers are discussing (e.g. brands vs. models or appeal vs. ethnography); “how” topics are discussed and, the language being used (e.g. direct vs. indirect references to products and the circumstances of their use). It also includes actual examples of what people are saying and provides actionable recommendations for refining product strategy and messaging.

Launch visibility and benchmark
This report offers unparalleled insight into competitive products and customer needs before, during and after a significant company milestone, such as product launches, movie premieres, new service offerings, etc. It helps marketers clearly understand the effectiveness and credibility of the key marketing messages and suggests “missing” messages that represent untapped opportunities.

Brands and products are benchmarked against competitors, providing both absolute and relative measures of performance. When integrated into a company’s business processes, this report’s customized benchmark database can be used to continuously improve marketing support.

Market assessment and benchmark
This report monitors shifts in discussions and provides a realistic, point-in-time market assessment of consumer sentiment. It indicates consumer likes and dislikes and outlines lessons learned for future development. Used as a periodic tracking program, these reports monitor the relevant market to provide continuous visibility of the relative health of a brand or product, providing a framework for the long-term management of brands.

Social Media Monitoring Services - Part 4 - Crimson Hexagon

Still gathering...

Part 4 - Crimson Hexagon
URL: http://www.crimsonhexagon.com/home/
Blog: http://www.crimsonhexagon.com/blog/
Model: Self-service online tool
Target: PR Groups & Corporate Marketing

Their pitch
Crimson Hexagon’s VoxTrot listening platform provides companies with actionable insight into consumer opinion of their brand, product, or market. VoxTrot technology can identify opinion from large quantities of text, whether it’s an in-house content repository or the vast blogosphere.

Today, VoxTrot users access a private, customized dashboard providing two views:

VoxTrot Buzz shows the volume of mentions and positive/negative sentiment on topics of your choosing, across the internet and social media sources. VoxTrot Buzz also provides our proprietary VoxScore metric, evaluating your topic’s perception across social media, based on number of mentions, their credibility, and reach.

VoxTrot Opinion helps enterprise customers drill deeper into relevant opinion, by letting companies explore:

1. Why is my sentiment trending up or down?
2. Is my messaging resonating with the right audiences?
3. What are the dominant opinions about specific product features?
4. What do people like most and least about competitive products?

The VoxTrot listening platform keeps your company connected to the voice of the customer using an innovative, automated approach — avoiding the high cost and risks associated with periodic manual reporting.

Listen
VoxTrot Buzz shows the volume of mentions and positive/negative sentiment on topics of your choosing. VoxTrot Buzz also provides our proprietary VoxScore metric, taking the pulse of your brand or topic based on its overall online performance.

Understand
VoxTrot Opinion helps enterprise customers drill deeper into relevant opinion, by letting companies explore:

1. Why is my sentiment trending up or down?
2. How is my messaging resonating with different audiences?
3. What are the dominant opinions about specific product features?
4. What do people like most and least about competing products?

Act
Our opinion technology analyzes internet sources (blogs, forums, Twitter, etc.) by identifying statistical patterns in the words used to express opinions. Bottom line: VoxTrot Opinion turns qualitative commentary into quantitative insights, allowing you to turn listening into action.

Social Media Monitoring Services - Part 3 - SentiMetrix

Continuing my collection of some background information on the tools currently available for monitoring, measuring and managing your brands within social media.

Part 3 - SentiMetrix
URL: http://www.sentimetrix.com/
Blog: http://www.sentimetrix.com/newui/blog/
Model: Self-service online tool & custom applications
Target: Marketers & Government

Their pitch
Start making sense of online opinions: The world has fundamentally changed now that the Internet has become a universal means of communication. Real-time newsfeeds and social media are an “echo chamber” in cyberspace. SentiMetrix will help you identify the opinion influencers and tipping points of sentiment expressed about the brands or subjects you care about most.

Products & Services
SentiMetrix offers the SentiGrade family of services for tracking opinions towards arbitrary topics expressed in the online news media, blogs, message boards, customer reviews and client-provided data. SentiGrade technology can be utilized in one of two ways:

SentiGrade Dashboard – easy to use Web-based interface that allows customers to track up to 10 topics at a time, compare changes of opinion over time by topic, country language and source. Data extracted from the Sentigrade dashboard can be exported to visual graphs or CSV files.

SentiGrade Data Service – a suite of web services for customers who have their own visualization solutions and wish to augment data with sentimenent scores . SentiGrade Data Service also allows clients to analyze their own proprietary databases.

SentiGrade provides access to data collected from a variety of sources from around the world, including over 9000 news/media outlets and a million top blogs. Additional custom sources can be included upon request.

SentiGrade services provide cutting edge tools with our unique combination of features:

1. Comprehensive list of information sources.
2. Contiguous scale of measuring sentiment.
3. Measuring the intensity of opinion the way people express it.
4. Proprietary, patent-pending near-real time algorithms for calculating sentiment scores.
5. Proven accuracy of sentiment measurement.
6. Multilingual capability.
7. Efficient and scalable backend architecture.

Socila Media Monitoring Services - Part 2 - Sentiment Metrics

Continuing my collection of some background information on the tools currently available for monitoring, measuring and managing your brands within social media.

Part 2 - Sentiment Metrics
URL: http://www.sentimentmetrics.com/
Blog: http://www.sentimentmetrics.com/blog/
Model: Self-service online tool
Target: Ad Agencies, PR, Marketing & Digital Professionals

Their pitch: Brand Management

1. Listen
SentimentMetrics locates and stores all the content about your brand, from millions of blogs, popular discussion boards, news and press release sites.

2. Learn
SentimentMetrics then cleans and analyses the data, presenting it in clear easy to read tables and graphs, for you to interrogate and glean actionable business intelligence.

3. Profit
The insight you gain from SentimentMetrics allows you to grow customer satisfaction, increase market share and profits, and benefit from a real competitive advantage.

Are you Listening?
People are talking about you, your brand, your products, your business. On tens of millions of blogs, forums, message boards and on mainstream media. What they are saying could make or break your brand or products. Are you listening to them? You should be…

With Sentiment Metrics social media measurement dashboard you can monitor and measure social media and gain actionable business intelligence, allowing you to develop more targeted marketing, improve products and increase profits.

Social Media Monitoring Services - Part 1 - Radian6

For the next couple of weeks I'm going to start collecting some background information on the tools currently available for monitoring, measuring and managing your brands within social media.

Part 1 - Radian6

URL: http://www.radian6.com/cms/solution
Blog: http://www.radian6.com/blog/
Model: Self-service online tool
Target: PR, Ad Agencies & Corporate Brand Owners

Their pitch: Brand Management

Listen
Radian6 gives you the power to listen across the social web for dialogue about and around your brand. Find discussions about your company on millions of blog posts, videos and photos, forums, mainstream online news, and micromedia like FriendFeed and Twitter. Real-time monitoring brings you critical insights and the ability to quickly discover which conversations are having the most impact online.

Measure
Listening is more than just collecting information; the right analytics are the key. With the Radian6 platform, you’ll be able to drill down into the data to see what content is making an impact, what needs to be managed or addressed, and even what areas of the social web are driving the most website activity and conversion for your brand. Segment and sort any conversation to multiple levels of granularity, instantly.

Engage
Radian6 workflow capabilities allow you to manage real-time responses across a team: assign, categorize and prioritize posts; create new contacts, leads or cases in your SalesForce.com system, and add source and post tags to content. With the Conversation Sidebar, share notes and comments internally, and respond directly from the platform (as well as capture the audit trail of responses). Email and IM alerts will even let you know when a new post surfaces so you can engage immediately, pass it along, or follow up later.

Report and learn
Demonstrating the successes and challenges of your social media engagement is critical to articulate impact, inform future strategy, and even determine ROI. Radian6’s depth of analytics and reporting empower you to evaluate your social media work and communicate its importance to your clients, colleagues, and executive team. Customizable graphs, charts, and reports are easy to create, download and share.