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Media Monitoring

Melvin

I have posted a response on Walter’s blog as I can’t seem to comment on your blog post.

Thanks for your views on our services… It would be rather cool if we were a spy services company helping companies to spy on people/sites. 🙂 We only listen to information that is in the public domain while spying would infer discovery of confidential information, which we don’t.

For the first step, we help companies effectively listen to relevant conversations, which is already done manually and painfully (through RSS feeds, searching Google, etc) by many companies we spoke to. This of course is only the first step, which many companies are just comfortable staying in.

People who complain unfortunately do it all over the Internet. As much as we would like them to all come to a centralized controlled setting, the reality is that they would go anywhere to post in their “natural environment”. If they feel comfortable in Facebook, they will complain or create a group there. If they frequent forums, they would most likely post something in that forum.
As a second step, the more forward-looking companies would also engage the community as you have rightly pointed out. They can do it themselves, get a PR company (in which we usually partner with) or directly engage us to do it. Monitoring is just a baseline that they need to gather feedback on whether their outreach is working or not. If not, how are they going to strategize to improve on it. This is really the “web-wide business intelligence” they need to effectively gather and strategize upon.

About our sentiment analysis methods, we have found that technology alone (at least those we researched on globally) can never be accurate enough to just trust the sentiment rating. Our respond to this “lack of highly trusted information” is to couple it with human + technology. Our Social Media Analysts (SMA) all have degrees/diplomas in mass communications and have been rating sentiments for traditional media previously. We have adapted that to suit our technology where the SMA would look at the topic being monitored and objectively re-confirm if the technology rated it correctly or not (thus training our system).

You are absolutely right that most companies (especially Asian based ones) are scared to death of social media because of the openness and transparency the web brings to the table. The silver lining is that we are starting to see companies evolving and accepting these engagement concepts. The whole industry benefits and the end users (like you and me) will enjoy a truly open conversation with the brands/companies they use.

I look forward to that day as I think you do too. Our team at Brandtology is happy to engage further in these discussions.

Kelly Choo (Co-founder & Product Development)
brandtology.com

We hire people for the Social Media Analysts role who have mass communication degrees/diplomas; most of who have past working experience in relevant industries.

Hi Ben, thanks for your thoughts on Social Media Monitoring Systems that need to have a Google-sized index in order to be effective. In our experience with talking to our customers, we have found that they do not need breath alone but also depth of the information. We have found that listening to the correct channels where people are saying something of value to the companies is more important. This is well said by Andrew Frank from Gartner in your blog post comment. Also, I don’t think anyone wants (at least our customers don’t want) to be getting Google Alerts 24×7 on their mobile phones. It will be simply too distracting and takes away any valuable time to do real strategic work.

Hi Melvin, we agree with you that eavesdropping is not a form of communication, so that’s why we also have other services to help companies engage their current/potential users. I have posted a response to your blog post. Thanks for your thoughts on this.

We’re always keen to receive feedback and how to further improve our services to better serve our customers. Thanks once again for all your thoughts.

Kelly Choo (Co-founder & Product Development)
brandtology.com

Hope you dont mind my frank comments and analysis and i want to add that i enjoy your blog very much.

Melvin

I’m beginning to think that all we need is Google Alerts set up to email your smartphone. That’s 24/7 monitoring on the world’s largest web index for free. And don’t you already have a PR agency to react to any pickup of critical issues?