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Social media monitoring – tools for journalists, activists and scholars

Adam Zbiejczuk (UISK FF UK, Prague)

CEECom2012 – 28. 4. 20121

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Today presentation

• Social media (the trivia)

• Monitoring of social media

• Overview -> Background -> Theory -> Practice

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Why should you take social media seriously?• To be present in social media becomes a norm -

as well as to be reachable on mobile phone or e-mail

• People expect you to be there

• The critical mass has been reached

• 15 years ago you might have said “I do not need those internets” - will this be the same case?

• Especially great tool for keeping “weak ties” and accumulate social capital

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The User

• 25 % results for 20 top brands leads to user generated content.(Socialnomics 2009)

• 63 % people take seriously other users’ reviews.(NM Incite 2011)

• Usually less than 10 % fans sees the posts by Facebook pages.(Allfacebook.com 2011)

• Customer service is the new marketing.(Frank Eliason, Citibank 2011)

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Social Media Monitoring

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How to work with the data

• Monitoring - gaining the data

• Measuring - filtering out signal from the data

• Analyzing - gathering non-trivial information using your insights from the measuring

• Reporting - presenting the results in an understandable way

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Listening

The art of conversation is based on listening. It doesn’t come from buying a license for an expensive set of tools, but from understanding the context and ability to focus.

Creating pie charts does not mean a thing.

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What is social media monitoring

The basics are similar to traditional media monitoring as we know it since 19th century - it makes it easier.

The value of information from a given source is determined by the energy needed to gain it from a different source.

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Noise vs. InformationThe noise is what we observe without any gains.

The noise is to be considered noise only in the context of what is the signal.

Signal is the information you are seeking for.

There is NO universal rule forwhat is noise and what is signal!

The same data can be bothdepending on what you arelooking for!

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There is no noise...

Week Visitors Income Facebook

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Twitter as a mean of stock prediction - predicio.com

Prediction based on models learning from tweets and users.

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OK, so how to do it?

• Why we want to track it?• What do we want to track?• What are we going to do with it?• Who is in charge?

Based on these answers we seek the tools and ask about: type of sources covered, the delay, level of settings, reportings, exports.

• You want to use different tools for real-time coverage and for reports created once a month!

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What to cover

• Facebook• issues with the Search API, problems with the country

and language specifics

• Twitter• advantage for CZ+SK: search engine+archive for all

tweets (over 20M tweets from near to 100k users)

• Comments (news servers)• hard to track well, full of crap

• Discussion forums / servers• underestimated part of social media, lot of potentially

interesting user generated content, can be very useful.

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International tools

• Can rarely cope with small languages• Declination?• Diacritics?• Local sources?

• Often offer too many functions - many of which do not make sense much• More complicated to learn to work with (= worse outputs in the end)

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International tools

• Radian6• Alterian SM2• Brandwatch• Sysomos• Lithium • NM Incite• Attentio• Vocus• … and many others

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Local tools

• Ataxo Social Insider• Buzzboot / Newton• Wunderman Listening Platform• eMerite

• These are different types of products, you shall not compare them based on “number of results” - pick the one that fit your needs the best!

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What to measure

• Volume of mentions over time• Number of mentions for various keywords or

topics• Source of mentions per channeů

• You can look for topics and trends

• Best results are based on qualitative - not quantitative analysis...

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Troubles with reporting

“Raw” wordcloud

Wordcloud without stopwords, lemmatized

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Troubles with reporting

Series of three words?internet v mobilu - 37xnabídku datových tarifů - 23xpodvodníci z vodafone_cz - 22x = oops?

swindlers

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Why we fail• We don’t know what we want...

• „Graphs? More graphs! Most graphs!“• Sentiment analysis automated? – Not really...• „We want reports, because we don’t have

time to really work with the tools.“

• Inability to work with the results

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Datajournalism

• British media as a source of inspiration• First attempts in CZ and SK (Hospodářské

noviny, SME) - fresh example• Datablog.cz• Civic journalism

• It takes time AND money AND people• Crowdsourcing could be helpful

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Thank you!

Adam Zbiejczuk / UISK FF UKadam@zbiejczuk.comwww.zbiejczuk.com

You can also find me there:

Credits: Josef Šlerka, Jan Boček