Intranet managers and web monitoring

October 1, 2009 | Comments (0), | Categories: Open Thread, Social Media in the Workplace, The Extended Enterprise |

In the open thread last weekend, Zeb asked the following question:

“…. what tools, services, etc are available for
companies to track trends such as mentions about their company, their
competitors, what’s popular and what people are looking for on sites
like Facebook, MySpace, Bebo & Twitter.“

I gave a brief answer in my post 30-30-30-10 Watch the Trends saying that that it is important for intranet managers to have part of their time focused on external issues.

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In the meantime I sent the question to one of my virtual colleagues with whom I have worked on numerous projects, Anthony Hamelle,VP of linkinfluence. Anthony blogs here (in French) but he is more than fluent in English as you see below in his response to my query.

Anthony’s response to Zeb:


“There are two main kinds of online monitoring services out there.

(1) Those that seek to capture and track as much data in as many languages as possible about your brands or topics of interest. They are like smart clippings services and are useful in an
e-CRM fashion (hearing everything everywhere and, inasmuch as possible,
providing timely answers to everyone).

Some better-known ones are  Radian6 (leading paid-for monitoring
service), Sysomos, Attentio, Twitter Search or Google Blogsearch (that
latter two being leading free monitoring services ;-)

(2) Those that seek to make sense of the data they track and capture. These tools are akin to market research solutions and services, filtering and organising data so as to reveal interesting trends that help decide upon strategies.

Some better-known ones are linkfluence (disclosure, I am VP of linkfluence), TNS Cymfony or Nielsen Buzzmetrics.

Although almost all providers work with some form of text mining, a line might be drawn between those that provide NLP (natural language processing, i.e. automated sentiment detection) and those that choose to rely on human analysts to interpret the data.

I for one think that NLP is not yet suited for the complexity and the heterogeneous aspect of language on the social web, meaning that human analysts still have to interpret and extract insights from the data…”

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Many thanks to Anthony. Do not hesitate to raise questions to him directly, or via Globally Local here in comments.

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