Social Media Monitoring. It’s exactly what it sounds like, and only slightly different to what I used to spend hours doing at university. Perhaps it’s a little creepy to know that it is possible to gather the whole internet together and read every word from the Twitter and Facebook accounts of strangers, but really it’s just a more advanced form of Googling.
Like with Google, knowing what to search for seems to be half the battle. The sheer volume of useless information, spam and generally strange corners of the internet I find myself wading through boggles the mind. Who are these people who have the spare time to create these awkward bundles of html?
Or maybe retro ‘90s web design is a thing.
As part of the strategy team, I use this data to inform companies about the public reception of their products, their campaigns, their brand. It’s probably more honest data than the sort you would get from a pop-up survey. Sometimes too honest, if the rage vented on Twitter is anything to go by, but this can be an opportunity, and woe betide the brand which ignores it.
As someone who is just starting out, it was interesting to get involved with an internal project – looking at our own Twitter feeds in order to see what we can say about ourselves here at Arena. It’s definitely a little creepy to be reading everything your colleagues have on their minds, but the insights we gained were very interesting. Even though we tweet about work 20% of the time. Worth looking at in a future post I think!
Here in the Strategy Hub myself and James Booth are always looking for excuses to combine our two true passions; Football and Social Media Monitoring.
We wanted to know how much incidents during the match affected mentions on Twitter in real time. What gets talked about the most? Who gets talked about the most? Is anyone weally warming to Woy yet? Can we make a little stick man that looks like Laurent Blanc?
Here is the result of our work, click on it for a larger version.
As you can see even for an event like England v France where you would think everyone who is interested would be solely focused on the TV many people were still dual screening to share the highs and the lows of the beautiful game.
Brandwatch who supplied the data for this visualisation have also created their own real time worm based visualisation for Euro 2012 .
So while it seems that everybody is going Jubilee crazy, with Old El Paso giving a nod to Queen Elizabeth’s love of the fajita, and Pizza Hut recreating her majesty’s crown in that traditional English delicacy – the pizza, we have been tracking the brands that have actually got people talking.
Whichever brand that has stood out for you in their red, white and blue jackets, whether they are ‘queentessentially’ British, or, not at all, our research has shown that however much a brand has dressed up their product, it all comes down to one thing. Would Jubilee’ve it? You have to be British to play British.
Social Media Mentions of Brands in Relation to Jubilee, source: Brandwatch
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