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)

The Echo Ratio for Social Media Analysis

Today we’ve added a new metric to our mediasphere360 Social Media monitoring and analysis tool; we call it the Echo Ratio. So what’s that? Quite simply, we look at Social Media marketing campaigns or activity that we monitor for clients and can measure the viral uptake of a campaign, meme or discussion topic being monitored.

In Social Media marketing campaigns and with any meme or hot topic, the content delivered starts somewhere; someone “tweets” it out, posts to YouTube or similar and then finds Conversation Igniters to start the spread. In some cases it’s just a blog that someone posts and it takes off like wildfire. This often happens with high profile bloggers/thought leaders like Chris Brogan, Jeremiah Owyang, Seth Godin or Beth Harte. Continue reading »

Analysis Paralysis: Are We Over Analysing?

Analysis Paralysis – when you’ve got so much data that you stop making effective business decisions. It happens to the best of us. Perhaps more so now. Marketers and communicators engaging in Social Media are debating heatedly over what metrics are right, what exactly to measure and what to report and how…and so on. With digital media, analysis becomes a easier than ever before – and both marketers and PR professionals are in part to blame, since they hyped this ability to collect such data. Add in that more CEO’s are spending their time bogged down in financial management than building the business, we have a situation ripe for analysis paralysis. There are so many measurement tools for Social Media that it is easy to become overwhelmed – and make the wrong decision, so no decision is made.

Marketers and PR pro’s will dump mass amounts of data into clients laps saying “look, it worked”, and this data then ends up in front of the CFO to justify the budget spends, which in turn has the CFO and CEO discussing budget spends – with too much data to make a truly effective decision. The issue then becomes over-analysis, getting to the minutiae that may not support a good decision by both marketers/communicators and finance.

Metrics are important, analysis should be done, it can help shape better financial and marketing/PR decisions. A CFO will spend money if it is justified, but it’s all about the “right” amount of analysis. So when running campaign or event analysis, concentrate just on the factual data that matters. Set the end metric first, then a few milestones to measure on the way to that goal. Good marketing is a managed investment, and managed properly the return is “growth” however that is organizationally defined. We often advocate heads of marketing and finance working together to align the strategic goals, while the “implementers” or tactical folks in marketing/communications and finance iron out the details.

Today, many financial managers have much a broader understanding of business. Working together you can set expectations on what amounts of data you really need to measure successes and failure and avoid analysis paralysis.

CEO’s Aren’t Reading Newspapers. What About Social Media?

Here’s a dichotomy; A Forbes and Gartner report shows, surprisingly, that the majority of CEO’s get their news from the Web, not newspapers. In fact, the study shows 70% of CEO’s view the Web as the single most important source for news. Yet Social Media struggles for integration with communications budgets and PR firms are still wrapping their heads around Social Media and it’s linkages to Traditional Media. Continue reading »