I think the title says it all for those to busy too read the full blog post! In case you are reading on though, our Social Media Monitoring Platform Sentiment Metrics now supports the monitoring of Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Norwegian, Spanish and Swedish languages .

When you set up a brand phrase, or keyword to monitor aswell as the usual AND and NOT operators there is a separate list box that allows you to select language.  We will then retrieve data for that language, of course using our demographic report, you can filter down data even further. So for example Spanish data from Spain, or Spanish data from Latin America…

French data from Canada etc…..

 If you are interested in this or have any questions please contact us

 We have just released some new functionality which allows workflow and collaborative working.

Workflow and data collaboration.

Next to every mention there is already a take action button which allows you to reassign sentiment and delete mentions. There is now also a “flag for response”, or “post idea” option.

You can post items to yourself or to other users on your system , or user groups.

There is a new Actions screen where you can view actions assigned to you, created by you, or participated in by you. You can respond to team members here, and view all responses.

This functionality lets you to go beyond monitoring and measuring media and allows you to keep a full audit trail on how you, or other team members have participated.

I was discussing with an agency client the other day Sentiment Metrics reach in terms of how much source data we index compared to leading blog search engines such as Google blog search and Technorati.

We did some comparisons across three of the terms they were monitoring and here are the results (terms not shown to protect their clients)!To get the raw numbers of social media mentions and online media mentions I checked in Sentiment Metrics reporting interface and database manually.

To get the raw numbers on Google blog search I did an advanced search. Selected the last month of data , English, and entered the phrase in the exact phrase box. Once the search was run I clicked the links at the bottom of the page until I got to the last page of results as their result count can not be trusted. I then recorded the number at the bottom of the page “In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the XXX already displayed.” As this shows their entire index for this phrase without duplicates. See: http://people.oii.ox.ac.uk/escher/2008/02/28/google-blogsearch-howto/   Section: Second problem: total results estimate.

To get raw numbers from Technorati I ran the query and looked at the numbers chart in the bottom right and added the total manually.   

Obviously there is a lot more to Sentiment Metrics than just raw numbers such as our Sentiment, Demographic and influencer analysis. However on just the simple metric of raw numbers you can see for all three terms we outperformed the two blog search engines. Our client was happy to confirm this!

Wow what a mouthfull!

However It is now possible to select reports, charts and data from our realtime social media monitoring dashboard and download neatly compiled PDF reports with a wealth of business intelligence.

Ideal for marketing departments, agencies or for showing to your clients!

Please contact us for example reports or a demo

A quick update.

We have added reports showing the demographic breakdown of mentions. This includes location, age and gender breakdown. You can also select to only view data from a certain country and/or gender and/or age range. What to know what 20-25 year old men living in the US think of your brand? Or maybe 10-15 year old women in the UK? Now you know!

Why not contact us for a demo or trial?

Well I haven’t updated this blog for a while, basically because we have been so busy working on our Social media monitoring service.

We have added some great features which I really should let you all know about!

-Topics. We now analyse all the snippets/mentions we have gathered about our clients brands for key topics. You can view a Topic cloud or sorted list showing the key topics around your brands.

-Widget summary- It is now possible to completely customise your summary page. You can select the reports/graphs you want to see, drag and drop them around the page and minimise them. A great way to get a snapshot of what is going on with your brands.

-Sentiment enhancements- We have made some changes to our sentiment algorithms and further increased accuracy.

-Mentions limit- We used to price based on the number of mentions. We have removed this restriction and now there is no mentions limits! It doesn’t matter how much data we have to process for your brands we won’t be charging you extra.  Our base package now comes in at £259 a month and you can track 3 keyphrases/brands. We also offer a white label system for agencies and larger clients where they can track as many phrases /brands they want for a fixed fee.

Coming soon-

-Report scheduler and designer (design your own reports and have them emailed to you when you want them!)

-Demographics- Find out which countries your brands buzz is coming from, whether the source author is Male or Female and what age they are!

We are pretty excited and so are our clients… When I look back at the improvements we have made over the last 6 months I am immensely proud.

There are more and more people knocking on our door everyday as companies are starting to realise the wealth of information they can harness from social media. There is real buzz around social media monitoring and measurement at the moment as anyone else noticed

We have just launched additional reports to further improve our social media monitoring service.

Sentiment Metrics now also shows reports on photos and videos recently uploaded concerning your brand. This was originally driven by hotel customers in the hotel review monitoring package, but we have added this to our core service.

We have also added Competitive intelligence reports. You can now view the sentiment of comments of your brand versus your competitors , also the share of voice your brand receives compared to your competitors. This is something one of our large cell phone/mobile phone manufacturing brands was keen to see added to our real time dashboard, so we listened and implemented!

We have some exiting new reports planned, and some new metrics we are investigating adding, but more about that soon!

We have just launched a new hotel review monitoring service to complement our existing social media monitoring service. Many people were coming to us asking us to monitor specific hotels. The amount of data on blogs for example on specific hotels can be quite limited. Although useful to have many people approaching us wanted hotel review monitoring, as they were spending too much time searching around.

One missed negative review for a hotel can mean people that would have booked with them go to their competitors. By using this product hotels can gain a 500-1000% ROI and we already have clients from several large hotel chains, who I think it is fair to say would swear by the service!

So what does the service do:

- Indexes and stores data from the major travel and hotel review sites (such as Tripadvisor.com, Travelocity.com, Travelpost.com, Expedia.com, Hotels.com, local.yahoo.com and Orbitz.com)

- Monitors millions of blogs and social media sites and indexes their data

-Ranks the reviews and comments by sentiment, so you can quickly see negative hotel reviews and respond

-Tracks average ratings overtime

-Tracks Tripadvisor scores over time

-Emails you when negative reviews come in

and much much more!

We believe this is an invaluable service for hotels who appreciate the time savings and peace of mind our service delivers.

If you are a hotel owner or incharge of a hotels marketing please contact us for a free trial, the service costs from $90 /£45 a month.

SentimentMetrics always shows the snippet or title we mined where your brand or keyword is mentioned in our data tables. See here:

You can then click through to view the original source. It could still take some time reading the entire article or post to find where your brand or keyword was mentioned.

We have made a small change so now when you click on the source link SentimentMetrics blog and media monitor highlights your brands mention in the original article or blog post. Simply click on the source in the data table, and we show you the source website with your brand or keywords highlighted.  Should save our clients some time!

View an example here:

Matthew Hurst has written an interesting post about sentiment detection at http://datamining.typepad.com/data_mining/2007/12/sentiment-minin.html.

He comments on the differences between automated and manual approaches, SentimentMetrics uses an automated approach and we are currently at an 80% accuracy which is considered good in the industry, however I sometimes get clients asking why something is negative when it should be positive which occasionaly happens.

Maybe we need to consider an human review stage in our service. The reason we haven’t so far is this would result in a delay in getting the data to the clients and also would inflate the cost of the service.  At present our clients seem happy with the service but it is definately something to consider for the future.