The Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR), one of AMEC’s Barcelona partners, has written a set of excellent guidelines for measuring social media.

CIPR CEO Jane Wilson explains on PR Week that “measurement should not just be about tracking, or trying to understand how influential any particular commentator or participant is. It is about identifying what conversations the organisation should participate in and understanding how engagement can help an organisation meet its objectives”.

One of the CIPR’s key assertions is organisations need to build on tracking the social space to identify the conversations to participate or start up.  Metrics should be analysed to gauge the impact engagement has on business goals, which it defines as ‘outcomes’.  Social buzz should be tracked and analysed as they can also be outputs of communications strategies and impact reputation.

From a brand perspective, monitoring and measuring social media is key to our clients who use social platforms to stay engaged with their audience.  As we mention in our recent post, the upshot of sustained engagement for Rentokil has been a 146% rise in enquiries to deal with problem nests as a result of its Ukwaspwatch.co.uk social campaign.   Proactive consumer engagement through social media has had a measurable & positive impact on their business.

Do you know what the outcomes of your social campaigns have been?

Roll up for the circus was the clarion call of Big Brother (BB) producers Endemol as the final series of BB kicked off last Wednesday.  Thirteen housemates and a ‘mole’ entered the house and we were off.  Shabby, Caoimhe, Ife, Corin, Rachael, Sunshine, Louise, Steve, John-James, Ben, Nathan, Govan, Dave & Mario the mole were in.

So, we joined the conversation around the online watercooler to bring you a 360-analysis of all the goings on in the house, the nominations & evictions, the twists & turns, who’s saying what, why and where.

Over the first few days all the housemates began to ‘bond’.  All was quiet in the state of Endemol.

But, all circuses have a ringmaster and Big Brother set wild-card hopeful Mario, now called Moley, a secret, ‘impossible’, task to sabotage the house until Saturday.  He wasn’t ‘officially’ rumbled by the others and was allowed to stay as a bona-fide housemate – with all the usual trappings: rows, conspiracies and a love interest.

So, where was everyone talking about BB?  A quick look at the channel breakdown showed all the noise was on Twitter with a 73.8 per cent share of voice.  In terms of authority, our social media measurement system scored Yahoo! Answers highest with a 62.6 per cent share of voice.

Figure 1: Channel breakdown for the Big Brother discussion – 9/6 to 15/6

Who was everyone talking about?

Figure 2: Girls buzz volume – 9/6 to 15/6

Figure 3: Boys buzz volume – 9/6 to 15/6

The buzz was around Sunshine and Mario over the course of the first week.  We also ran a snapshot of the Big Brother discussion in online news and social media for the hot topics.

Figure 4: Topic cloud for the Big Brother conversation – 9/6 to 15/6

The stand-out topic was John-James, the bookies early favourite to win. The tweet below gave us a bit of clue about his early popularity.

Fast forward to Monday – nominations day.  The annual love-in between all the housemates came to its traditional early end.  Six days was a long time in reality TV and the honeymoon period was well and truly over.  The first row erupted between Dave and Govan – over some onions.  A right old ding dong followed.

On Tuesday, there was a nominations twist which created another buzz in the tweetstream.  First off, Shabby, Sunshine & Dave were put up for eviction by the house.  But, Dave beat the other two in a challenge, saved himself, and put Rachael up instead.  Shabby was agitated about her nomination and had a bust-up with Ben.

Who’s likely to go?

Figure 5: Sentiment for nominated housemates – 15/6

Yesterday, Sunshine was the most talked about.  She also had the highest number of negative mentions – mainly calls to get her out.  But, there were also reports that she was being bullied by the other housemates. (Daily Star 15/6)

Shabby was the bookie’s favourite to go at 8/15.  But, where we’re predicting Rachael.

It was also the week when Twitter joined the fray.  The airline’s boss Willie Walsh criticised Unite joint leader Derek Simpson for tweeting live details of Saturday’s talks.  The row added to a wider debate on using the micro-blog in official meetings, and elsewhere, Coalition ministers have already been told to leave their BlackBerrys at the Cabinet office door.

So what’s happening?  And, what’s the real impact of the strike?  A bit of social media monitoring using Sentiment Metric’s system helped us to make sense of, and measure, the impact the strike was having on BA, Unite, and the airline’s passengers.  We looked at online news and social media.

We were able to look at buzz levels around the dispute, influencial sources in the discussion, what everyone was talking about and also look at whether comment on the strike was positive, neutral or negative.  We also added a human touch to our research to interpret and assess the valuable information generated by our system. 

Figure 1: Buzz volumes for the strike – 20/5 to 26/5

We monitored thousands of mentions, in real-time, across the BA discussion, and tailored our research to mentions of BA, Unite and the strike.  One of the first things we noticed was a spike in coverage on 23 May when buzz volumes peaked at 579 across all channels.

Our industry-leading custom reporting tool generated the top 75 lead topics for the strike over the reporting period.  It showed that the Unite union’s negotiations with BA to settle the dispute dominated coverage.  On 20 May, the High Court over-ruled an injunction that had stopped the planned walk-out by cabin crew.

And, the great thing about our system is we can track people, products, services, industry terms and over 300 types of other entities.  We are not limited to single word phrasing in the topic cloud.  So, as you can see in the chart below, we picked up topics such as ‘industrial dispute mediator’ and ‘High Court’ in the lead topics.

Interestingly, there wasn’t a mention of passengers in the lead topics but the effect of industrial action on the airline’s passengers was discussed.  Some human analysis across our system showed a focus on the disruption many passengers faced as the strike went ahead. (politics.co.uk 23/5)

Figure 2: Topic cloud for the strike – 20/5 to 26/5

Figure 3: Topic cloud for the strike on Twitter – 20/5 to 26/5

The custom reporting tool also enabled us to analyse the lead topics on any day, on any channel.  Two phrases on Twitter jumped out: the reference to a web campaign heating up and a ‘brutal web war’.

So, who was driving the discussion?

There was certainly a lot of noise on Twitter, which led the pack in terms of mentions with 49.8 per cent share of voice.  This was among the top ten influencial sources.  In terms of authority, our social media measurement system scored BBC News as highest with a 19.4 per cent share of voice.

Figure 4: Top influencial sources for the strike – by mentions – 20/5 to 26/5

Figure 5: Sentiment for the strike – 20/5 to 26/5

Over the reporting period, our system analysed over 1500 mentions of BA, Unite and the strike for sentiment.  The results across all channels were:

27.8 per cent of mentions were scored as positive
53.4 per cent of mentions were scored as neutral
18.8 per cent of mentions were scored as negative

There was positive sentiment to news that Unite won its appeal against a High-Court injunction on Thursday. (BBC News 20/5)

BA attracted positive sentiment on news that it had successfully run 65 per cent of 65 per cent of flights in May. (gather.com 23/5)

But, there was a negative tone to comments on BA’s balance sheet and there were many referencing to the fact that BA was a loss-making airline. For example, LA Times (25/5) 

A passenger post on Digital spy talked of the ‘buffoons’ at Unite taking at action at the ‘world’s worse’ airport – Heathrow. (Digital Spy 21/5)

We also noticed a spike in negative mentions on 23 May and we found that these were driven by syndicated comments from Unite joint general secretary Tony Woodley.  The union leader said there had been a “catastrophic breakdown” in relations as the deadline for the first strike neared.

Using the custom reporting tool, we could also drill down and look at sentiment on individual channels such as Twitter.

Figure 5: Sentiment for the strike on Twitter – 20/5 to 26/5

The spike in positive sentiment on 20 May was driven by chatter on Unite’s High Court victory.

The spike in negative coverage on 23 May was driven by chatter about the protestors that stormed the talks.

Talks on 26 May to end the next wave of strikes on 30 May were postponed until Friday. It is difficult to predict the final outcome of this bitter dispute. The question is will either side be declared a winner in the end?

Search term configuration screen

Expanded Twitter Coverage

Previously we picked up a good deal of Tweets from Twitter, but it wasn’t exhaustive. We now have full Twitter coverage. We have added a new “Micro-blog” category to the channel reports.

Admin screen changes

You can see a screenshot of the new look and feel here, but I promise its even better when you use it live, why not contact us for a demo or trial :

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