UKNetMonitor

What the UK Political Parties are saying about social media.

2015-04-20T13:04:00.000+01:00

It may be the most "social" general election ever, but the political parties are actually showing little interest in social media as far as their policy development is concerned. After a close reading of all the main party manifestos we see a little concern about the use of social media to encourage hate crime or terrorism, but a welcome, marked reluctance to engage in any form of regulation.

UKIP is says that it will include internet/cyber crime in a review of sentencing policy to address the changing nature of crime.
The LIBDEMS take a similarly liberal view saying that would seek to protect free speech by ensuring that social media is not treated and more harshly than any other media.
The CONSERVATIVES focus on the use of social media by terrorists and say they would seek new powers to prevent those seeking to radicalise young British people online from using the internet or communication via social media.
LABOUR make just one reference to social media in the context of hate crime, saying they will take a zero tolerance approach and will challenge prejudice in social media, saying they will strengthen the law on disability, homophobic and transphobic hate crime.
The SCOT NATS make no mention apart from saying that Nicola Sturgeon stands out in personally engaging with people on social media.

UPDATE: Plaid Cymru are silent in their manifesto on social media too.

Social Media at the weekend

2015-04-11T11:59:00.002+01:00

We monitor what is being said on the internet everywhere, all day, every day. Of course. But is the weekend any different? And if so, what does it mean for our clients?

We should note that not everywhere in the world has the same weekends. Muslim-majority countries typically enjoy Thursday and Friday, although Saudi Arabia has recently switched to Friday/Saturday , and Brunei has Friday & Sunday. Putting that to one side, there are marked differences in what we see over the weekend that have two major impacts.

Firstly, there is certainly less planned corporate driven content. Fewer press releases and reports are published for people to react to, which drives down the overall levels of mentions and comment over a weekend. This does provide opportunities to grab people’s attention in a less cluttered social media environment. Target stakeholders may not be at their desks, but they are still likely to be checking their social media feeds throughout the weekend, particularly on their mobile devices, so it is a good time to get some positive messaging out there.

Secondly, when people are talking about our clients over the weekend, it tends to be event driven, and often bad news. This makes it more important to be monitoring closely over weekends, when a swift reaction is required. Don’t leave it until Sunday evening to check what is being said about you.

If volumes of mentions, and the type of content changes over the weekend, perhaps the most important aspect to consider is the change in tone. A more personal, softer approach to posting is important. When people are away from desks, with their families, they will want to read interesting, entertaining content, rather than dry, challenging material. Keep it human and relaxed.

Are blogs and forums coming back?

2014-08-14T12:51:00.002+01:00

No one can doubt the impact that social media has had on the older forms of user generated comment (UGC). Discussion forums, newsgroups, chatrooms and blog comments were all the places to go for comment, buzz and chatter. Then came Facebook, Twitter et al, and more recently newer networks like Snapchat. Unsurprisingly, the amount of UGC across the internet increased substantially, but the proportion on the old platforms took a hit. A big one.

In the past few months, however, we have see something of a resurgence of blogs and forums. Are people moving away from social networks? Maybe. Certainly anecdotal evidence would suggest that recent changes to Facebook and Twitter are putting people off, and more people are re-engaging with spam free platforms that they can trust, like discussion forums, and indeed setting up their own websites reflecting their own interests. We have only measured this in the United Kingdom, and it would be interesting to see if the same pattern is emerging elsewhere.

Where are people talking on the web?

2014-07-01T17:33:00.000+01:00

We have a wide range of clients, from a UK driving school through to the world’s largest steel company. Monitoring the web for them gives us a privileged insight into the chatter across the world. So far this year, we have extracted half a million significant posts about our clients, from more than 50,000 different websites. It’s time to look at where people are posting their views. Social networks of course, and our top networks are no surprise, although we do note the impact of Russian and Chinese speaking networks being increasingly relevant to the UK.

twitter.com

www.facebook.com

www.youtube.com

vk.com

plus.google.com

instagram.com

www.flickr.com

www.weibo.com

Whilst there is a clear decline in print media sales, people are increasingly taking advantage of the opportunity afforded by adding their comments to reports on mainstream media websites. With their mass readership, the comments are widely read and can be influential. They can certainly keep a story running. Our top UK sites in the past six month are:

www.dailymail.co.uk

www.thetimes.co.uk

www.ft.com

www.cityam.com

www.bbc.co.uk

www.express.co.uk

www.standard.co.uk

Just as importantly, discussion forums continue to hold there own as a focus for exchanges of views and comment, making them some of the most opinion-forming websites online at the moment. The specialist “niche” forums where the levels of community trust are high, are probably the most influential, but the larger generic boards are reaching a very wide audience:

forums.moneysavingexpert.com

bravenet.com

www.lse.co.uk

www.thestudentroom.co.uk

uk.finance.yahoo.com

forums.digitalspy.co.uk

forums.overclockers.co.uk

www.mumsnet.com

If your social media monitoring service is not providing you with a complete picture, then give us a call.

We're flattered ...

2013-09-20T15:35:00.002+01:00

We're flattered to be short-listed for a Top Employer award by workingmums.co.uk.

We love our clients.

2013-09-09T17:10:00.000+01:00

Post by Richard Brown.

Best practice for brands using hashtags

2013-04-16T13:08:00.000+01:00

#OMG #BRAND #NEW

Using Twitter well is clearly important to brands, and the best use of hashtags is an important part of that mix. We have brought together some of the best advice from across the web in a free White Paper. You can download it here.

Hashtags are essentially a tool to help users identify posts that have something in common. For brands they offer an opportunity to demonstrate that they are relevant to a particular topic – typically an issue, or an event. They can also be used by brands as easy labels for a campaign that can quickly be remembered or searched for (hashtags as a URL). Users expect hashtags to coalesce conversations.

Hashtags are a tool for curating information. They provide context and category to content so that they reach a specific but usually broader community of interest than a brand’s particular followers.

Most brands successfully using hashtags have a clear idea of why they are doing it. This is typically to engage a broader audience, to track a conversation, to demonstrate brand values (humour, innovation, service, thought leadership etc.), or to support a broader marketing campaign.

Hashtags are most successfully used to engage a brand with a particular conversation (or to start one). Typically this will not be about a product, but be more generic unless they are used for one of the following purposes:

Managing specific campaigns, particularly competitions or to label a conversation around an event;
Raising brand awareness, this is nearly always accompanied by considerable above the line advertising;
Sharing content that is high quality, engaging, and audience focused-this is a conversation not a shop window.

The use of hashtags is aligned to encouraging followers. Successful hashtag use will lead to more engagement and then more followers. Hashtags should not replace @accounts. They have discrete functions and one is not a substitute of the other.

Individual hashtags are carefully crafted, particularly to ensure focus – no-one will search for #food but they might search for #pizza.

The use of hashtags fails where:

Simple technical practices are not followed, such as using punctuation or spaces in hashtags;
Hastags are not specific enough;
Overuse makes them meaningless;
There is no conversational resonance or call to action;
Hashtags are simply repeating a corporate slogan;
Hashtags are hijacked by spammers or others seeking to damage a brand.
Hashtags are confused with Twitter account names. The latter are addresses customers use when they want to talk to you or get your attention, not necessarily talk about you and should be kept to a minimum.

You can download the free White Paper here.

Social Media over-analytics

2012-08-09T11:17:00.001+01:00

Far too often we see some really impressive analysis - usually presented with clever graphics that actually account for little more than a can of beans.

Take this chart from the reliable e-consultancy which reports QuBit's benchmarking of top UK gambling sites.

Betfair will be rightly pleased to see their score higher than their competitors, they have worked hard to achieve a lot. Further analysis makes the point that where they stand out is their Pinterest presence, which accounts for 2 out of its 14 points. All good stuff, and lessons for everyone to learn. BUT ... as e-consultancy point out, Betfair have just 12, yes twelve, followers on Pinterest.

Social media has moved from the domain of the public relations and community teams, who instinctively know what good looks like, into the marketing departments, who are desperate for statistical analysis to justify the spends. This in turn is driving a social media analytics industry. But is this analysis really worth it? We reiterate, the only ROI measure that needs to be considered is profitable sales and too much time is being wasted by social media teams looking to over-analyse their performance. You'll know if it is working. You'll just know, and so will everyone else.

2012-05-29T13:34:00.002+01:00

Responding to Stephen Fry

How a TalkTalk guy beat the social media teams of the major UK ISPs.

Stephen Fry tweeted this at 7.08 AM on 28 May 2012:

“Thanks BT - just close my BB a/c for no reason, why don’t you? Hello Sky, Virgin - anyone but Bloody Trouble. Grrrrr” (Here)

As you might imagine, his million-plus followers were not backward in coming forward with their advice as to where he should go for his broadband. What interested us, was how quickly the different competing ISPs got in touch.

In true Usain Bolt style Virgin Media were quick out of the blocks with a tweet less than 2 hours later:

@stephenfry We would love to have you back, we've certainly missed you! | JM 8:55 AM - 28 May

Five minutes later, AAISP were on the case:

@stephenfry Let us know if we can help with your internets! :) 9:00 AM - 28 May

A quarter of an hour on, Be Broadband responded:

@stephenfry just let us know if you would like us to help you sort anything out 9:13 AM - 28 May

In the meantime, @BTCare got around to responding, seven hours after Fry’s original post.

@stephenfry Hi, I can sort this out for you. 2:07 PM - 28 May

Other ISPs, late to the party, piled in. 13 hours later, O2 Broadband put themselves forward.

@stephenfry Hello there, if you're interested in O2 Broadband, visit: http://j.mp/H8Bkcq Let us know if we can be of any help! 9:26 PM 28 May

More than 24 hours later, some still thought they were in with a chance. Hello PlusNet, I’m talking about you:

We are owned by BT Retail but operate independently... happy to answer any questions, if you have any ^MT 10:34 AM - 29 May

But the winner was Tushaar Masri. A TalkTalk guy, who took the initiative to respond directly, on his own account (not TalkTalk’s) within an hour of Fry’s original post, at a quarter to eight on a Monday morning.

@stephenfry I work for TalkTalk, let me no of u would like a quote... 7:45 AM - 28 May

I've no idea whether Mr Fry stayed with BT (my own experiences of @btcare have always been excellent) or has gone with another ISP, but the lesson I draw here is the importance of encouraging everyone in your organisation to act as a social media ambassador for the company, and not to wait for the official channels to put their shoes on.

UPDATE:
Also interesting to note by referrals to this post what social media platforms these ISPs are relying on. Anyone using Pulsar or Mediafunnel should be asking some serious questions. (Shameless plug for UKNetMonitor, see post below)

20 Questions to ask when choosing a social media monitoring service

2012-03-13T16:55:00.000+00:00

Along with the growth in social media we have seen something of an explosion in the development of social media monitoring services. Choosing the right one is an essential part of your social media strategy, and largely depends on what it is you want to achieve. If you want to get it right, and most importantly get value for money, then ask some of these questions.

1. Just how comprehensive a service do you need? Some services only cover Facebook, Twitter and a selection of blogs, but if you need a complete picture, make sure that your monitoring is also covering other social networks, such as LinkedIn, PInterest and Google+, or even foreign platforms like Weibo. More importantly, discussion forums, consumer review sites, and comments on mainstream media sites are probably more influential, more widely read, and more significant than posts on any other platform.

Just as important as the range of platforms is the geographic and linguistic scope. Do you need to know what people are saying everywhere in the world, and in any language? Even if you only operate in one territory, your stakeholders are all over the world, and the way information travels, a comment on a Chinese discussion forum, is as likely to impact your reputation (or that of your suppliers) as a post on a Canadian blog. If your monitoring service is covering the world and multiple languages then make sure it also provides a translation. If you can't understand it, it is valueless information they are giving you.

Will your monitoring service cover those parts of the web that others can’t reach? Whole swathes of the web do not get covered by search engines, and typically need registration, log-ins, and passwords. An effective service will identify those sites/forums and set up appropriate mechanisms to access the buzz behind the wall.

What about audio, video and images?

2. How focused do you need your monitoring? You can do keyword searching yourself, but that’s the problem. You need to find needles in haystacks, and your monitoring service needs to be highly effective in filtering out spam, content farmers, duplicates, repeats, adverts, blogrolls and so on. There is a tension here between filtering out too much, which risks missing that important post, and not filtering enough which means you will be swamped.

3. Can you calibrate significance? It is said that more than half of mentions of supermarkets are people giving directions or arranging to meet nearby. You probably don’t want that in your feed, so it is vital that your monitoring service can make an accurate judgement about what you need to see. Can it accurately calibrate what is, and what isn’t significant? This will vary according to organisation and issue. You may think a customer reporting a delay of 2 minutes in getting through to customer service is immaterial, others may not. Your monitoring service needs to be able to calibrate to your requirements. Does one customer posting a poor review of your product matter, or should it only be flagged when several do? It should be your call.

4. Can it disambiguate effectively? Few organisations have completely unique brand names, and the ability to identify relevant posts is at the heart of effective monitoring. This is not just being able to tell the difference between “The Automobile Association” and “Alcoholics Anonymous”, but can it distinguish between The AA in the UK, and The AA in Ireland, South Africa or New Zealand? Relying on semantics to differentiate between the two is a weak response destined to fail. “AA +recovery”? Is that about cars or alcoholics? A good monitoring service will never include irrelevant posts.

5. Are the data outputs tailored? Like Burger King, you should get your data, your way. Do you need different outputs for different people within your organisation? Printed reports and executive summaries are useful for some audiences, but others will want access to online drillable dashboards. Do you need to get emails, text alerts, or phone calls to alert you to specific items? You will probably want an XML or RSS feed that directly supply your in-house information systems. What about other platforms? Do you need to access your monitoring service on your tablet, or phone? Do you want to be able to track your own organisations responses to posts through the monitoring service?

6. What kind of statistical analysis do you need? There is a full range of metrics that can be applied, particularly when you have a wealth of accurate information (nb GIGO as they used to say in the computer world). Statistical analysis is valuable in quickly identifying things that matter, and being able to visualise the big picture is essential. Your monitoring service should be able to present the information in a way that suits your business. Can you highlight trends, or out of the ordinary events how you need it? Charts, maps, hotspots, and gauges are all useful tools.

7. Do you need historic data and trend analysis? If all you are doing is responding to what is being said NOW, then probably not, but the ability to go back and see what people were saying, how sentiment has changed over time can add value. How far back do you want your monitoring service to keep data?

8. How quickly do you really need to see posts about your organisation? There are two trade-offs to bear in mind: cost and accuracy. Any instantaneous feed is likely to suffer from some of the problems above. Human intervention is required to ensure that the data you get is relevant, material, significant and accurate. This takes time. Then there is cost. Near real-time human intervention will push up the cost. If you are monitoring social media in a crisis then this is exactly what you need, but if your main goal is customer service, then a reply within a hour or two, or even 24 hours, may be enough and will bring down the cost. More strategic reputation management (provided it is supported by an urgent alert system) does not need that kind of immediacy, so there is more room to save costs.

9. Do you just want a cuttings service, or some intelligent curation? Any organisation with more than one brand, product or service, will find it useful for citations to be categorised. Can you have it your way? Monitoring should be able to categorise and therefore extract particular products, sites, territories, or even themes such as sustainability, price, or customer service.

10. How accurate to you want your sentiment analysis? If you are dealing with lots of data, then errors should even themselves out. However, once you start to drill down it becomes more important that sentiment analysis is accurate. Machine based, semantic analysis is at best around 75% accurate. In the UK, in particular there is a heavy use of irony, and when a post in less than 140 characters, computers are frankly poor at judging sentiment. People are good at both understanding intent, as well as context. We do it all the time.

11. How does your monitoring service assess the influence of a poster or website? This is a controversial area with a number of different metrics available, but some degree of sensible judgement should also be applied. One poster may be very influential in one field, but irrelevant in another.

12. Do you need a profanity filter? The output of your monitoring service may be widely circulated around your organisation, or even be made public for your customers to see. Do you want everyone to see everything verbatim? Similarly there may be inappropriate or personal comments being made that do not warrant being repeated around an organisation. A social media monitoring service should be able to trap those.

13. How flexible is the account management? Can you tailor what different people within your organisation receive, and how they receive it? You should expect to be able to direct specific traffic to the right place. Is there any account manager that does more than send you an invoice, that you can talk to if you need help or advice?

14. Do you need the right mix of experience in the industry with the flexibility to cope with emerging new social media platforms? This is a fast moving sector and the ability to detect and monitor emerging sites of influence is critical, but some mature perspective and experience is necessary. particularly in a crisis.

15. How much does your monitoring service need to understand your organisation, or at least your sector? There are benefits to be drawn from using a vertically specialised service that will quickly grasp what is significant in your industry, but equally a horizontal provider will have an overview that allows for cross-knowledge of emerging trends and issues.

16. What kind of advice and active engagement do you require? Do you want a holistic approach to social media with one organisation providing monitoring, marketing advice, SEO, reputation management, customer service etc. Or do you take the view that your press clipping service doesn't advise you on PR, why should your social media monitoring service? What additional services would be useful and add value? Strategic or tactical advice, or responding to posts on your behalf? Can your monitoring service carry out ad hoc pieces of research, say into reaction to competitor launches?

17. What kind of organisation do you want to deal with? This can range from simply a seller (or more likely a re-seller) of a packaged software solution, to a committed team of people dedicated to your own processes that you can actually talk to. Will you need out of hours contacts? What type of people are they? Where do you want the focus to lie: social media experts, data processing specialists, PR practitioners, consumer advocates, reputation managers? Actually, probably the most important question is “Are they people?” or are you just dealing with a machine?

18. The usual due diligence questions will, of course apply. Is your monitoring service going to be there next year? Do they have the resilience to cope with data recovery? Can they cope with sudden high volumes of work in the event of a crisis? Do they meet your own social and environmental responsibility standards? What is their record on client confidentiality? Do they understand the particular legal issues around social media monitoring (particularly copyright, privacy and libel)?

19. How much will it cost? The million dollar question, but fortunately not a million dollar answer. Because Google is free, many organisations seem to think that all forms of monitoring should be similarly priced. (This, at the same time that they are spending large budgets on market research.) The cost will depend on what you want. It is only the value that you get that really matters. Whilst any organisation can point to that "one post" it flagged up that saved the client millions, it is the day-to-day input into your organisation’s work that adds value. Much of the value will depend on what you do with the information you get, but how much management time is being saved by outsourcing the monitoring? How much insight is being contributed?

20. Can we help you?

Image: xedos4 / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

MoneySavingExpert now has as many active users as Twitter

2012-02-21T10:31:00.003+00:00

Monitoring Social means more than Facebook & Twitter. At UKNetMonitor we have tended to bang on a bit about how important discussion forums are. They engender trust and loyalty, as well as active considered engagement, and consequently have considerable influence over reputations. Particularly over the longer-term, compared the the now six-hour long attention span of Twitter. YouGov’s latest research underlines this in spades:

“Moneysavingexpert.com, the expert consumer financial advice site, now has as many active users as Twitter. As well as articles on financial products, users of the site can create profiles, leave comments and interact in similar ways to other social media sites. This points towards a new phase - the rise of social sites with slightly more purpose than just connecting to people for the sake of it.”

Monitoring discussion forums is not easy. Few of them have effective APIs and long threads don’t index well for search. This is why the kind of high degree of human intervention is essential for anyone wanting to monitor what is being said and read on the forums. Anyone relying on a solely computer-based keyword search monitoring, is only hearing half of the conversation, and probably the wrong half at that.

Anywhere working

2012-01-18T20:17:00.002+00:00

There were many reasons why I started UKNetMonitor seven years ago, but one of them was that I had young children, and was having trouble getting the work-life balance thing right. This was largely because I loved my exciting job at Telefonica O2 (and so was doing long hours) but mainly because I was doing three to four hours commuting every day. Dead time.

I had the words of a very good HR Director ringing in my ears: “Work is what you do, not where you go”, and so, when we started the company, we decided that we would provide work in such a way that anyone could do it, anytime, anywhere. And it works. Here are just some of the reasons why remote work is great for employers, as well as employees:

No commute means people can start earlier, or work later without disrupting their lives. That means clients are serviced for longer.
Our carbon footprint is smaller, not just because of less travelling, but because we need smaller offices (heat, light etc.)
We can recruit from a much broader pool of talent, in particular, parents looking after their school children, who can put in a nearly full working day if they don’t have to commute, but also people with mobility disabilities.
Remote workers can quickly be called upon whenever there are peaks of work at very short notice if necessary.
Because work is distributed, our systems are more reliable and sustainable. A power cut in the office, or even just bad weather, doesn’t bring everything to a grinding halt.
Remote workers don’t need to be paid a city premium but can be paid above local rates.
Remote workers can be anywhere in the world, so if we need people working in different time zones, or people with different language skills, we can easily employ them.
Remote workers are very productive. There are probably more distractions in a modern office, than there are anywhere else.
Family and personal life impinges significantly less on work. If someone needs to go to the dentist, they don’t need to take the whole day off.
We get the “whole” person, not just the one that turns up to the office.
Staff meetings take place in the pub.

For the individual much the same can be said:

No commute means more time with the family, or doing what I want to do.
I can organise my day so that I have breakfast with the family, but am also there to read the kids a bed-time story, having done a full day’s work.
Less travelling costs me less money.
I can find work that I otherwise wouldn’t be able to do, at wages which are typically higher than locally.
If it is a quiet day then I can go off and do something else, rather than clock watch and pretend to be working. If it is a busy day then it is easier for me to juggle all my other needs.
If I need to look after myself or my family, I can without letting everyone in the team down.
If I work better early in the morning, or late at night, then I can choose to do that because I am not bound by office hours or train timetables.
I can be myself, without having to conform to some corporate stereotype. I don’t even need to get dressed to work.
Staff meetings take place in the pub.

There are many other reasons for employers to think about encouraging remote working. Whilst it works for us, it certainly isn’t good for everyone – our business just needs a computer and a fast internet connection – and there are certainly downsides, but they are few. That is why we are excited by the AnyWhere Working initiative: “Work anywhere. Save time, money and the world” is a good slogan, but it doesn’t tell half the story.

Measuring social significance, influence and reputation

2012-01-04T20:55:00.001+00:00

At the deep heart of social curation is giving extra weight to some people’s opinions than those of others. As the volume of user generated content grows, measuring social significance is certainly becoming more important. The volume of opinion and comment is becoming too great to monitor and respond to effectively for many brands. When UKNetMonitor started curating social media in 2005, we were typically coming across only 100 significant mentions a week of some fairly large household names. Now it runs into thousands a day, along with the tens of thousands of insignificant mentions. As social content has grown we have developed a range of tools that measure significance to help sort the wheat from the chaff. These have been centred around (a) the individual poster, (b) the website, (c) the context of the posting, as well as (d) the actual content, often culminating in an easily digested 5-star rating system.

Website significance has always been handily measurable with page ranks, inbound links, and where available stat counters. For discussion forums, chat rooms and newsgroups we can look at metrics like the number of active members, threads and posts. Of course, this doesn’t tell the whole picture, as a web site may be highly significant to one brand but pretty unimportant to another. But it is not a bad rule of thumb.

The context of the posting is all important. This is not just about the political, consumer or economic environment at the time, but about the current priorities of a brand, which may have, for example, just launched a new product, or got a new CEO. These are inevitably ever-changing and somewhat subjective, but also go to the content.

The significance of content is equally variable. Some aspects are easy: we know that one negative review of a product is likely to shift opinion, more than two positive reviews, so sentiment measuring is important. Content relating to hot topics, such as the environment, or crime are likely to attract more attention. We can put measures in place for all of this and more, but they do differ according to the perspective of the company or brand. No one single algorithm can be applied.

The importance of the individual poster will be one of the greater challenges for 2012. If social curation is to be weighted by an individual’s importance then we need an accurate measure, and we also need to know what we mean by important. Is it just loud, or is it influential, by which we mean opinion forming? Does it need to be action provoking? A single disruptive voice could as significant, as a crowd. Like page-ranking, people-ranking leads us down an iterative measurement process. How many friends and followers? How many friends and followers do they have? How many retweets, shares and likes? By whom? Is the poster a creator of original content, or a trusted curator in their own right? Ah, yes … trust. How long have people been following a poster? All this needs to go into the heady mix aka algorithm. And then there is the real world. What about people’s off-line influence? Rupert Murdoch’s ability to garner thousands of followers on Twitter within hours was not entirely due to the quality of his tweets. Before we had social media, opinion-formers were identified rather subjectively. In each industry we knew who the movers and groovers were without having to put a score on them. Our ambitions have grown, and now it is not a question of identifying the top 100, but the top 10,000 or top half a million people, in our own efforts to get our message heard, or to hear what is being said.

Like it or not the demand for tools to measure social significance is likely grow, and the market is growing to meet that demand. As well as the myriad of overgrown counting machines crunching their way through the Twitter API, services like Klout, and PeerIndex are beginning to get a foothold, whilst others are coming on stream in the coming months. Each have their failings, but like democracy, they may prove to be the least bad system. If social curation means our world view is defined by the interests of our social friends, reputation ranking means our online significance will increasingly depend on the significance of our friends. Once again, we end up in a vortex where we need to choose our friends carefully.

Social curation is an alluring evil

2012-01-02T16:30:00.004+00:00

"Getting information off the internet is like taking a drink from a fire hydrant" - Mitchell Kapor

When we used to rely on newspapers for our information it was common to read just the one paper that most closely aligned itself to our own prejudices. This gave us a warm but warped perspective on the world, with our own narrow outlook on life being confirmed by the events and opinions we read about. Our consumption of the internet hasn’t changed much of that at all. Despite opening us up to tap into and untold variety of opinions, interpretations and analysis, Google can always provide us with the evidence that confirms our specific point of view is right. Facebook and Twitter can provide us with the like-minded friends. That’s why we like it. And social curation means it is going to get worse.

Search engines have been tailoring, not just their adverts, but their search results to match what they think we are interested in for some time. Facebook does much the same. Twitter provides us with a wholly self-selected stream of opinion. What is changing however, is that these platforms are not just looking at what we are interested in, but they are analysing what our internet friends are interested it. Social curation selects what we see by analysing what our friends are sharing, liking, plus+’ing, retweeting, With apps like Zeebox, even our selection of what we watch on TV is being influenced by who our friends are and what they are watching. Just as you could be defined by the junk mail you received, the internet now defines us increasingly by the friends we keep. If we choose a wide circle of friends with varied interests, and opinions then all will be well, but it is inevitable that there will be bias in what the internet delivers to us. This is just those with the loudest voices getting the most attention: those with high social media skills and presence (and not just those with impressive Klout scores) will have their opinions figuring more prominently on the different internet platforms we inhabit. Nothing wrong with that, but in allowing our internet consumption to be determined by our e-social circle we are narrowing our personal weltanschauung into a decreasingly downward spiral if we are not careful. It is not us – broad-minded people that we are - that will exclude minority or contrary opinion and information from our Facebook timelines, our Twitter feeds, and Google+ streams; it is the platforms themselves that force us to look through the wrong end of the telescope.

The range of content management systems that rely on social is growing, or at least growing more social. Digg, Stumbleupon, Paper.li, Scoop.it, Storify, Postrank (now owned by Google) and Pearltrees are the ones to watch in 2012.

Content curation is no bad thing. We are all suffering from information overload, and this is, after all, what UKNetMonitor does for its clients – we sift for the significant and relevant posts about our clients so that we and they can assess and analyse no more and no less than the information needed. However, we do it dispassionately and hopefully reasonably objectively.

We should applaud content curation that provides us with the serendipitous, that does inject provoking material, and does challenge our own world view, but social curation relies on the opinions, biases and prejudices of our social friends/likes/follows/circles as the arbiter of our content. This means an ever narrowing perspective of self-reflecting mirrors. We should choose our friends carefully and widely in future. Otherwise we (individuals and businesses) just end up drinking our own bathwater.

Forums still dominate social media

2011-12-16T16:32:00.008+00:00

Despite the clear dominance of Facebook and Twitter as the platforms of choice for people to express opinions, once again we have seen the influence of discussion forums providing the most significant weight of opinion that brands should be concerned with.

For our sixth year of social media monitoring we have curated posts that were significant and relevant to our clients from 856,793 different posters, including blogs, social networks, discussion forums, comments on the websites of mainstream media, customer reviews. Having sorted out the wheat from the chaff, this gives us some insight into where meaningful and influential opinions are being expressed. Looking simply at volumes of posts or traffic, about everything (Bieber, anyone? ) we, predictably see Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Yahoo Answers, and LinkedIn on top. But, this is no help to a brand or reputation manager. Opinions are being influenced elsewhere. Where? On the discussion forums. Of our Top 40 sites, 19 were discussion forums, accounting for 51% of the influential posts. This should surprise no-one. We are more likely to trust the opinions of those with whom we share a common interest.

Another key take-out from our findings is the importance of opinions being expressed in the comment sections of the websites of mainstream media. Just as many noteworthy comments are appearing here, as appear on Twitter. Newspaper and broadcasters websites remain highly viewed and are increasingly proving to be noisy debating chambers as well – particularly at a local and regional level.

This is something our clients fully understand, but why is it that so many others think a social media strategy means Facebook and Twitter, overlooking the enormous opinion forming influence of the forums and online newspapers? We think it is because it is too difficult. Monitoring of discussion forums is not easy. Measuring it is even harder. Conversational threads are not susceptible to the kind of key word searching done by software alone, and a high degree of human intervention and intelligence is required. Anyone relying on a purely computer based platform for monitoring consumer generated content, is missing out half the picture, and probably the most important half.

Of course, this isn’t the whole story; no-one should overlook the power of twitter as an amplifier, and opinion spreader, nor should anyone under-estimate the intimacy and trust people have within the friends on Facebook, but anyone devoting more than half of their social media attention to Facebook and Twitter (because there are cheap tools that make it easy) should re-think. Social media monitoring needs to cover the whole waterfront.

And, yes, MySpace did not appear in the Top 40, and UseNet Newsgroups are fading fast. Google Plus, meanwhile is slowly making its presence felt and we expect to see a stronger showing next year. For anyone interested, our top 40 sites during 2011 were:

1	Twitter
2	Facebook
3	forums.moneysavingexpert.com
4	www.digitalspy.co.uk
5	www.boards.ie
6	forums.thinkbroadband.com
7	www.cableforum.co.uk
8	www.sagazone.co.uk
9	forums.overclockers.co.uk
10	www.youtube.com
11	www.ispreview.co.uk
12	pub37.bravenet.com
13	www.mumsnet.com
14	www.dailymail.co.uk
15	www.reviewcentre.com
16	www.guardian.co.uk
17	www.techwatch.co.uk
18	www.3g.co.uk
19	uk.answers.yahoo.com
20	www.miningmx.com
21	www.netmums.com
22	community.adn.com
23	www.thestudentroom.co.uk
24	www.bbc.co.uk
25	www.cable.co.uk
26	www.hotukdeals.com
27	forums.macrumors.com
28	www.thisismoney.co.uk
29	www.consumeractiongroup.co.uk
30	www.pistonheads.com
31	www.babyandbump.com
32	www.brandrepublic.com
33	www.adn.com
34	discussions.apple.com
35	www.bitterwallet.com
36	www.sheffieldforum.co.uk
37	www.iii.co.uk
38	www.telegraph.co.uk
39	www.dooyoo.co.uk
40	www.techradar.com

Employee Blogging

2011-09-13T11:43:00.003+01:00

We spend a lot of time monitoring what employees are saying about their clients, which is quite a lot. Unsurprisingly this has resulted in many companies developing sophisticated employee blogging policies. (The best of which is simply: "We pay you. We read what you post. The two are linked.") Some companies have chosen to be quite draconian, whilst others encourage a free open, and often, public debate. it seems this may change, in the US at least , following an NLRB ruling, which appears to provide a considerable level of protection to employees from any disciplinary action resulting from posts about their work.

"Employees have a protected right to discuss matters affecting their employment amongst themselves. Explicit or implicit criticism by a co-worker of the manner in which they are performing their jobs is a subject about which employee discussion is protected by Section 7. That is particularly true in this case, where at least some of the discriminatees had an expectation that LC might take her criticisms to management. By terminating the five discriminatees for discussing LC's criticisms of HUB employees' work, Respondent violated Section 8(a)(1)"

Sutton Valence Preparatory School is fundraising for The Children of Yirgaalem

2011-06-17T19:50:00.000+01:00

Sutton Valence Preparatory School is fundraising for The Children of Yirgaalem

All support welcome ...

Saving money on market research

2011-03-07T15:37:00.003+00:00

An interesting piece of market research (ironically done by a survey ) from MarketTools, claims that 94% of companies do not yet use social media channels such as Facebook and Twitter to gather customer feedback. The most common ways companies gather customer feedback are email or online surveys (51%), formal phone surveys (28%) and informal phone calls (28%).

When organisations are putting so much emphasis on improving customer satisfaction, within the inevitable constraints of cost-cutting, a golden opportunity is being missed. Conducting market research by surveys - whether online, phone or focus groups is expensive. Few would doubt that. Monitoring social media on the other hand actually provides a richer seam of information, not just quantitative but qualitative customer feedback in near real-time. Five years ago, when UKNetMonitor first started monitoring user generated content on the web, the main concern of our clients was reputation management. Since then we have seen social media used to raise awareness, build brands and provide for some limited measure of customer engagement, but the large unfulfilled area remains customer feedback. Our advice is to walk away from the surveys, don't just look at social media as another sales and marketing channel, but get into active listening mode. Simply harnessing the freely given opinion of customers must give the biggest ROI available to any organisation on a tight budget. Why pay to extract opinion and comment from reluctant interviewees, when real customers are enthusiastically expressing them, and want organisations to listen?

Sentiment scoring

2010-10-07T10:14:00.006+01:00

We keep enjoying the rubbish that is generated by automated sentiment scoring. Here's some classics from twitrratr.com which rated a search for what people were saying about a particular website, as 9 positive, 39 Neutral, and 4 negative. Looking deeper however, it includes classic mis-scoring such as:

"fuck you*****. i need to pay my bill but because you've cut me off i can't call you to pay. & your website payment pages don't work. good one" - rated as POSITIVE
"Oh my God, FUCK YOU ***** WEBSITE. Why can't you just be straight forward! Maybe if you didn't have so much shit going on, you would load! - rated as NEUTRAL
"soooo pee'd off with *****. Not the ppl on the helpline but the**** website need shooting" - rated as NEUTRAL
"Why is the **** website always down whenever I need to try access my account? #fail" - rated as NEUTRAL
so excited for our new website - check it out! www.royalhuntoxford.com" - rated as POSITIVE (but totally irrelevant).

As always, garbage in garbage out. Any brand manager relying on this kind of analysis is going to be missing the real picture by a mile. Lovely graphs and great to have metrics, but if the underlying analysis is false it is of little value.

Machine driven semantic analysis can only get you so far, as so much of sentiment depends on context and perspective. Humans still rule at this, and this is why organisations that need accurate data, and reliable information use the high quality premium service that UKNetMonitor offers.

Sentiment monitoring Part 2

2010-07-14T14:20:00.002+01:00

Can't resist posting more examples of duff sentiment measurement. I'm sure Sainsbury won't think this is a particularly daming post: " I've been to Sainsbury's. Had a lovely chat with two random old ladies. They prefer XBox to PlayStation. I couldn't talk sense into them. " but it gets marked up as negative by a machine.

Sentiment monitoring

2010-07-14T14:10:00.003+01:00

The problems of machine based sentiment monitoring never cease to entertain us. Amused to see this tweet ranked by one of our competitors as being "negative: "Got the raging munchies! Think I'll pop to Asda and grab a few bits to munch on!" It just doesn't cut the mustard. GIGO. The only reliable sentiment monitoring is still human based, able to parse the syntax with some sense, and assess the context, instead of relying on a list of negative words.

Bears and Popes ...

2010-03-19T14:20:00.000+00:00

"Consumers are increasingly using social media websites such as Facebook to vent their anger after receiving poor service, according to a survey. A quarter of consumers polled by the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) said that they did not get good service from businesses."

Social media monitoring

2009-11-30T12:29:00.001+00:00

Been meaning to post this link up for a while.

The problem(s) with social media monitoring technologies

Definitely worth a read.

Dealing with shill reviewing

2009-06-29T22:29:00.002+01:00

At UKNetMonitor we spend a lot of time monitoring what is being said about our clients on review sites, such as Ciao, DooYoo, TripAdvisor and so on. A frequent issue is that of "shill reviewing", where highly positive reviews are posted up - typically by someone employed to promote a brand, pretending to be a bona fide customers. These can be difficult to spot, and ordinary data miners typically fail and simply collect any review that is posted. Our human moderators check for veracity in a number of ways. Firstly, shill reviewers tend to be very crude and over egg the review posting uncritical comments. More importanly we take the trouble to see whether a poster is a long-standing member of that particular board, and whether or not they have posted reviews about other things. Nothing stands out more than someone making their first (and often only) post which is unequivocally favourable. We can also spot if the same of similar reviews appear elsewhere - particularly if they are all on the same day. What should a client do if we spot shill reviewing? Most boards will respond constructively to a take-down request. Shill reviewing is bad for their own integrity as much as anything else.

It is worth noting that this kind of activity is actually illegal in the UK. Posing as a consumer to promote something would be considered an unfair trading practice. The power of customer reviews does, however, remain strong. We are naturally inclined to believe what is said by reviewers, and more often than not consumer reviews are just that - honest accounts of someone's experience.

Resilience, the web and Michael Jackson's death

2009-06-26T11:22:00.003+01:00

Michael Jackson's death was clearly felt by the social media networks across the web causing some to fall over as news and views were quickly swapped. We're glad to report that all UKNetMonitor's systems (and people) coped well with the massive increase in overnight traffic needing to be spidered, scraped, filtered,moderated and coded.

Bloggers and twitterers alike will be keen to point to how effective social media is at disseminating news and comment, so I will only note that I first heard the news on old fashioned analogue radio, although that is probably more to do with the time zone I was in when Mr Jackson died.