Social Media Crunching

You can't blame people for getting a bit paranoid about what people are saying about them on Facebook and worse, Twitter. But it is now a serious business if your brand is being dissed on them and you haven't got a strategy to deal with this. Are you advising your clients to think this through? Are you trying to deal with it by using tools to monitor what's going down on the social grapevine?

Well, luckily a few companies are ahead of the game and Fresh Networks with their sister company FreshMinds Research have done an analysis of seven social media monitoring tools in a free report you can download from their site at www.freshnetworks.com.

This also gives some insight into the basics of social media monitoring, where to find social conversations, and the drawbacks of monitoring social comments. I imagine from my linguistic days that it can be a nightmare to analyse chatter let alone texting but I'm interested in this side of things because language analysis has progressed leaps and bounds. I just wonder if the analysis gets hold of the wrong end of the stick more often than not! (Imagine trying to analyse that last sentence!). Get more about this by looking at The Problem with Automated Sentiment Analysis 28th May by Matt Rhodes.

Whatever, social media networks are giving the trad media boys some puzzlement over what good they can be to them. New Media Age (3rd June issue) featured the dilemma for broadcasters after the BBC have integrated the iPlayer with Facebook and Twitter enabling users to share and recommend shows to each other. Of course, the rest of the TV players want in on the game.

Talking of games – yes, we'll be avoiding the World Cup so there won't be a blog next week. We're off snorkelling in warm waters, ash permitting.