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)