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Monitoring one’s brand or image is nothing new. In the olden days, companies might have held focus groups to find out what consumers thought about their product, brand or company. Today, it’s much more complicated to gauge your reputation.
Companies are no longer just producing print materials and television advertising. In fact, companies are not the only ones generating buzz about their product. Nowadays, social media can transform a relatively unknown company into a “household” name in nanoseconds. And though social media can have a meaningful impact on a company’s reputation, it’s no secret that it can also destroy them as well.
Social media monitoring has become its own industry, featuring a number of services aimed at monitoring what people are saying about you, your brand and their experiences online. By scouring the web for comments, tweets, status updates, blogs and more, it’s relatively easy for companies to understand how they are being perceived in the global world.
Yet, like most tools designed to give you information and analytics, it’s important to understand what to do with the information so it can best impact, influence and advance your position online. We’ll look at three tools that monitor the social web and case studies that show how they were applied to real life problems.
Case Study 1: Idolstats.com / American Idol
Whether you live in one of the 100 countries that broadcast American Idol, or tune into your country’s version of the reality talent television show, you’ve probably questioned the outcomes that voters have produced. Recently, the finale of season 9 announced Lee DeWyze the winner, defeating the crowd favorite Crystal Bowersox. The media cried it an upset, but the folks at Idolstats spoke otherwise.
The Process
On April 1 Biz360.com, provider of social media monitoring and market intelligence solutions, launched Idolstats.com. The site was designed to track and evaluate conversations so as to predict the outcomes of American Idol. By mining millions of tweets and social media conversations, Biz360 interpreted insights to predict which contestant would be voted off each week.
[Side note: on April 28, the Attensity Group, a leader in business user applications that generate value from unstructured data, acquired Biz360. Biz360 and Attensity have become Attensity360]
Using what is now Attensity360, social media conversations — including blogs, message boards, forums, micro-blogs, online news media and social networks — were aggregated and analyzed. Reports were reset weekly the evening of the voting show and continued to dynamically aggregate and report until the next voting show, allowing users to visit anytime during the week to get a near real-time snapshot of how the contestants are performing based on social media conversations.
The Outcome
While many were enamored with Crystal Bowersox’s performance and declared her the inevitable winner, Idolstats was indicating that Lee DeWyze was carrying over 60% of the contestant conversation.
Figure 1. This graph shows that Crystal has been a favorite all season long, and most often just ahead of Lee on that trendline, but it the final weeks, Lee began surging. (courtesy of Idol Stats blog).
On their blog, Idolstats explained how this conversation could accurately predict the winner:
Data tells us that he is much more popular than Crystal in social media, and twice as likely to be talked about online. As with our previous posts, we extrapolate that to mean that social media mindshare is a proxy for action in the form of phone voting. As far as sentiment goes, Lee has a slight edge over Crystal, with Lee at 66% positive and Crystal at 62%. In absolute terms, because Lee has more mentions, he has more positive mentions than does Crystal.
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