Weak Signals & Social Media Monitoring

Weak Signals? These are essentially the little “tidbits” of information, words such as “tags” or keywords, that give an “indication” of something. Perhaps a potential “meme” shaping up, or a subject about to become hot. In some cases they point to a conversation. Most monitoring tools don’t and can’t pick them up. They aren’t always keywords one thinks of to enter. The greatest value to weak signals though is not as a single word or phrase/comment, but a set of commonalities within those weak signals.

String them together or plot them using a capable software, and you can begin to see bigger pictures, detect a trend or find somewhere else to start digging. All of which requires a skilled analyst and the use of the right kind of software. In the intelligence field, weak signals are always a key element to investigating an online issue for police, intelligence and similar professionals.

But they can also be a rich source information for marketing purposes. If you’re engaging a social media research firm or online monitoring tool, it can help to ask if they understand what weak signals are and the value they can bring. None of the automated tools in the commercial sector can deal with weak signals…no software is that good. Yet. Eventually, certainly. As most social media monitoring tools rely on API‘s (backdoor connections to access search results) into consumer search engines (e.g. Google, Yahoo!, Bing) only, they rely heavily on the algorithms used by those engines. Those who understand and can work with weak signals will have their own methodology on how to use them, as we do at MediaBadger. We don’t make that public because that’s part of our value and well, we are a business.

The benefits of being able to understand, then find and work with weak signals are many on the marketing side. They can indicate a trend around a product, be it yours or a competitors, that can enable you to engage an audience before a crisis or while an opportunity is on the upswing. For public relations, you can become aware of a potentially breaking or critical story and get ahead of the curve. You might find an interesting new route into a discussion underway that provides key insights into your industry or market.

Weak signals are useful, but it’s about understanding what they are, how they can be useful and how to go about understanding them. Once you do, you might be amazed how they can be used.

(Author: G. Crouch)

Tourism The Most Active Industry in Twitter

We do research across a broad number of industries in our Private Sector practice. So we recently decided to look at which industry is the most actively engaged on Twitter. In short, the answer is tourism. We looked at our aggregate data from over 150 research projects in the past year and then analyzed Twitter hashtags and industry mentions as well as cross-referencing the number of Twitter profiles that mention a brand name that can be categorized in standard industry classifications or where the industry is stated. We did not include celebrity Twitter profiles or government tourism departments. Also, we did not include “social media agencies or professionals”. Tweets were analyzed for the USA, UK and Canada.

Tourism won out hands down. Aside from being the most active industry in Twitter, it also came out tops on two other fronts; most likely to share competitors tweets (within and outside their region) and being re-tweeted by followers. The most re-tweeted links or tweets were those that featured images and video of a destination. Most popular for tourism was high-quality images of a location or area.

Tourism is followed by MLM (Multi-Level-Marketing) schemes (no comment.) Then by the ICT sector (Information & Communications Technology, e.g. Dell, HP etc.) but the ICT sector for consumer goods/electronics did not see anywhere near the level of re-tweets as tourism, this was similar with the MLM sector. ICT was followed by consumer goods (indicated as Goods on graph) such as shoes, cosmetics and fashion. Last was the PR or Public Relations sector, in which we included marketing firms, but not exclusively social media agencies or independent social media consultants.

Social Media Monitoring for Public Companies

It is important, but not just for brand monitoring. It’s important for a number of reasons beyond basic marketing purposes, perhaps more so for a publicly traded company. For smallcap companies it may be easier and less costly, but is still important. Here’s why;

1. Investor Relations: For those companies on the pink sheets or venture exchanges most chatter takes place in stock bulletin boards – but not all. Your stocks may well be discussed in other forums, on social networks (e.g. LinkedIn or eCademy for business social networks) or via microblogs such as Twitter or Identi.ca. You can gain key insights into investor moods and how they are discussing your business or even competitors.

2. Board Governance: Some insights can serve to keep the board informed of general market trends and assist in governance matters. Including warnings that there may be an emerging issue to address in rough times such as large lay-offs.

3. Liability & IP Protection: You can use these tools to monitor for possible infractions on intellectual property protections such as patents. If unions are involved, monitoring public forums may give warnings of strikes. You may face leaked information that can affect stock prices (such as United Airlines suffered when a blogger posted they were bankrupt; several years after the fact and the stock price tanked.)

4. Adults Too: Chatter across social media channels is not just for kids; thinking that way can be a costly mistake for a public company today. The average age of a Facebook user is 43 and for Twitter it’s 38. There are a number of social media channels that are of no interest to kids, such as for golf or sailing.

5. Management Monitoring: Senior executives of public companies often come under scrutiny not just by news media, but by shareholders and sometimes the general public. Monitoring and researching social media channels can help keep an eye on the reputation of senior executives and help avert any potential crises.

These are perhaps the primary reasons to research social media channels to begin and then monitor those channels on an ongoing basis. There’s so much information moving onto the Web every day that no industry sector is isolated. Before you monitor however, it’s best to retain your PR firm or a research house to conduct the initial scan of your ecosystem to help understand what to monitor, how frequently and to what degree.