Social Media Monitoring & Crisis Communications

Enterprise Grade Monitoring Tools

In  the last three to four years, several “enterprise grade” social media monitoring tools have reached the market. These are more complex and more powerful than a collection of homemade RSS monitoring feeds in that they follow scientific algorithms and come with more features than a simple dashboard.

December 2009-March 2010, the social media space swapped chaos between British Airways and Eurostar as they were torn by industrial action, weather crises and accidents. How brands are perceived in social media says a lot about their reputation. Image and monitoring results courtesy of Attentio, a global company specializing in enterprise grade social media monitoring.

Such a platform usually has features like alerts, trending, analysis and a form of ranking system to display influence. Although most have a global reach through the nature of what they do - monitoring the worldwide web - a good many of them fall short in one important respect, which is language.

If, like me, you are interested in knowing what is being said about your company in Europe, then you need a system which “understands” the multitude of languages spoken on the social web in this area. Not every system on the market understands Dutch or Finnish, which has an impact on sentiment tracking.

This is important to take into account when considering the purchase of a monitoring platform, especially as they come at a different price tag than your home made dashboard.

Before going for a fully featured online monitoring platform it is important to ask the following questions:

• What is the geographic reach the platform will need to cover: a country, a continent or worldwide ?
• Which languages are important to me and how far do I want to go with automated sentiment tracking ?
• Will the platform only be used to monitor or do I need powerful analytics as well ?
• What are the sources and how are they accessed ?

You can find a good overview of several suppliers on the market offering these solutions on the Wiki of Social Media Monitoring Solutions, created in August 2009 by Ken Burbary and Adam Cohen.

Article originally published in Communication Magazine - Author: Philippe Borremans - Date: July 1, 2010

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