Social media monitoring isn’t exactly a household name… yet. In the meantime, there are obviously a lot of questions asked by those unfamiliar with it.
Hopefully, the following will give you a greater understanding of how our platform works. You can also check out our official social media monitoring FAQ page for a more in depth look at this exciting technology.
Question: Why does my company need social media monitoring?
Until recently there has been somewhat of a balance of power between the major social network players. Twitter was your go-to tool for mass public broadcasting as long as you can keep it brief. Facebook was more about the personal relationships with friends and family where as the TV show Cheers theme song says “everybody knows your name”, plus a few brand and celebrity page options and brainless games. And then Google+, after learning some hard lessons with Google Buzz, focuses on organizing relationships and allowing significant control over your privacy and who you share with via circles.
In Part 1 of this blog series we looked at the anonymous posts in our Visible data repository to see which media type is the most mysterious and discovered blogs have the most secretive posters. In Part 2, we looked to answer the question of whether or not the growth in popularity of Facebook and other social networks like Google+, where people more openly identify themselves has influenced how people self-identify in other social arenas.
In this final post, I wanted to dig a little deeper into the qualitative side of what people were talking about, openly or anonymously, to see if there were any noticeable differences. To do this, I used the Topic Discovery feature in Visible Intelligence. In an effort to mitigate news spikes and fleeting hot topics, I included the entire month of July. Finally, I decided that it would be most meaningful to narrow the view to broad topics like travel, automotive, cellular, movies, etc., in order to quickly surface some interesting comparative content. Here’s what I found in the travel research:
I’ve been dabbling in the world of Google+ for a few weeks. In that same time, Google+ has grown considerably faster than its predecessors, surpassing 20M as of July 22, 2011. For many, particularly marketers, it is daunting to think about a whole new social network on the web. We’ve only scratched the surface of what Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, blogs, forums, bookmarking, pictures, YouTube and the whole slew of others have to offer. There’s been a lot of activity swirling the social web around this network, and even more opinions in the real world about what it all means. So, like everyone else, I’m going to share mine.
Is the growing popularity of social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn and now Google+ helping to breakdown the online anonymity of social media? Anonymous online authors have always fascinated me because there is so much, and at the same time, so little value in what they have to say. There is freedom and candor in being an anonymous entity. Heck, that’s a huge appeal of the internet for a lot of folks. But when it comes to social media the door is wide open for bloggers and online community members to provide truly honest, positive or scathing reviews and experiences as well as malicious stories and comments that are untrue. I’ll leave the issue of how companies and brands should handle these posts to some of the other social media guru’s at Visible Technologies and our partners but let’s see what the numbers have to say is happening.
I thought it would be interesting to take a look at the wealth of data in our billions of posts we’ve collected over the years and do some analysis to see how many people actually post anonymously, how they compare by media type and finally see if there have been any changes over time. I started by looking at a week’s worth of July 2011 data for the largest volume media type sources in our data repository. For the purposes of this project, an anonymous poster is anyone who does not have an identifiable online persona or handle (anonymous, guest, unknown, etc.).
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Frequently Asked Questions in Social Media Monitoring
Posted by Ellen Enrico on December 19, 2011Social media monitoring isn’t exactly a household name… yet. In the meantime, there are obviously a lot of questions asked by those unfamiliar with it.
Hopefully, the following will give you a greater understanding of how our system works. You can also check out our official social media monitoring FAQ page for a more in depth look at this exciting technology.
Question: Why does my company need social media monitoring? Read more…