Social Media Monitoring

For this week’s blog we were tasked with using social media monitoring tools and essentially see what they are about. I chose QueenslandHealth as it is the case study for assignment two and wanted to see how Queensland Health is currently using social media. There are many tools out there for monitoring but I chose to focus on two, Socialmention and Howsociable. While both essentially do the same thing, monitor how many times the phrase “Queensland Health” appears through social media posts. The analytical display takes two different directions.

Social mention (Social Mention, n.d.) is a free tool that collates, displays and analyses information from 100+ social media outlets such as Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google etc. You type in a search phrase and it returns some analytical data and also a listing of posts attached to that search phrase. The aspect that makes it stand out from the rest is that it measures the search phrase’s influence in four categories:

Queensland Health

• Strength –Indication of the likelihood that there is discussion on social media about the search phrase. The calculation used by social mention is; mentions divided by potential mentions in a 24 hour period. Pretty basic.

• Sentiment – It displays generally positive to generally negative mentions through social media in ratio form.

• Passion – Indication of the likelihood that the search phrases are being talked about repeatedly by the same individuals. Example given by social mention is that a higher score would be achieved if a small group talks consistently about the search phrase a higher score will be achieved.

• Reach – Indication of the range of influence. Calculation used by social mention is; Number of unique authors referencing the search phrase divided by the total number of mentions. So the more unique authors are posting about the search phrase the higher the reach score.

You may have noticed that I state “search phrase” rather than the term “brand” that social monitoring tools use. This is because when I searched for Queensland Health on social mention it displayed information for both Queensland and Health, sometimes giving me postings about Health in the USA. Fortunately it does have an advance search function where I could make it search for the exact wording or phrase. This type of problem is not unusual for basic search engines but leads me to question the accuracy of social media monitoring.

Miami

Miami Dolphins

 I further tested social mention and searched for Miami and then Miami Dolphins (Go Fins!!) and there was a definitive divide between posts about the city of Miami and the NFL team Miami Dolphins, which leads me to think that if there is an established brand it does not matter if there are spaces for this type of monitoring. This further makes me think that the “brand” Queensland Health has not established itself in the social media sphere and that is why you can’t just type in Queensland Health. Also in the FAQ section of Social mention when asked how does it work? The answer is it works. Obviously they won’t tell the exact calculations that it uses so it can get stolen by competitors but it feels like a bit of snake oil.

A few other concerns I have are:

• Strength – as I said earlier the formula used while simple does not state how they derive the possible mentions, possibly to thwart competition on their calculations but if there is a key aspect of Web 2.0 and more importantly Enterprise 2.0 it’s transparency.
• Sentiment – The ratio given is only a positive to negative ratio, when doing a search on Queensland Health, Miami and Miami Dolphins there was a multitude of posts that were deemed neutral.
• Passion and Reach – These categories are intertwined because of the way that it is calculated you can not have high passion and high reach.
• The most interesting trait that I found about Queensland Health was its lack of strength, it only rated 2%. I think that the strength score is calculated against all possible posts, so Queensland Health which has a limited audience to start with competes with some big names who are dedicated a massive amount of posts worldwide.  Potentially also the lack of “brand” name for Queensland Health hinders the analytical analysis that these tools derive.

I also looked at Howsociable. This is similar to social mention however the data analysed is displayed as a magnitude score from 0-10 (with 0 being no activity and 10 being lots) it also breaks it down by social sites, youtube, facebook, twitter etc. The non registered version provides information for four social sites, the free registered version is for 12 social sites, and the pro version looks at 36 social sites and costs $9 USD for 3 months. The pro version gives access to the social media heavyweights, Facebook, Twitter and Pininterest. On the free non registered version it gave scores for youtube, linkedin, google plus and foursquare.

Queensland Health had all very low scores I might add. While I didn’t want to pay for the 3 month subscription, $9 gets me 2 pots or a pint at the uni bar! The way that it breaks down a score for 36 social sites makes it a very interesting proposition as it would allow an organisation to see what type of social sites they could improve their reach into e.g. their Facebook score might be an 8, while their Twitter might be a 3 and might encourage a shift towards Twittering more etc.

As I stated earlier there are a multitude of social monitoring tools, however I think that care must be taken as to how much to actually believe these tools and also to not just follow them blindly. Or maybe companies should just keep following blindly as the world would be a worse place off without social media fails.

References:

socialmention - about