Speakers Announced for Monitoring Social Media 09 – 17th November, London

We’ve now published the impressive list of speakers and panellists for Monitoring Social Media 09 on our new event website, along with more details of the programme.
We have some of the UK’s finest digital PR and marketing thinkers, in the form of Alan Moore (SMLXL), Neville Hobson (The Hobson & Holtz Report) and Antony Mayfield (iCrossing), [...]

Interesting chat with someone in the Government Press team just now about how difficult life is now Lord Grayson has taken to Twitter. When important people tweet, it’s fine for them, but everyone around them is then expected to follow them every minute of the day!  (I work with Doug Richard ;)

Microsoft to Launch Social Media Monitoring Tool

Microsoft is planning to launch a social media monitoring tool – that allows users to aggregate social media feeds from Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Facebook and more into a single interface. Dubbed “Looking Glass” the service will be tested over the coming months for a presumed launch in the Winter.
Early indications are that it includes automated [...]

Working in the Shadow of Google

In planning MSM09, we’ve met lots of skeptics about the future of social media monitoring. The classic response is, “Wait until Google launches it’s SMM service”. Google already runs the simplest form of web monitoring: Google Alerts. It also has Google Reader, Google Trends and, of course, Google Analytics – which between them could easily provide the basis of a monitoring solution…

The Pros and Cons of Automated Sentiment Detection

Last month The New York Times featured an article on sentiment detection which was also picked up by ReadWriteWeb. These articles only skimmed the surface of the many hundreds of social media monitoring services emerging, but they did raise some interesting points about automated sentiment detection that are worth exploring…

Monitoring Social Media 09 – What’s it all about?

Monitoring Social Media 09 is officially off the ground! We’ve got an excellent venue (The Lewis Centre, Millbank), some fine sponsors (to be announced shortly) and a startlingly good line-up of speakers, including Alan Moore (author and thinker), Marshall Manson (Edelman UK), David Cushman (Brando Social), Giles Palmer (BrandWatch), Neville Hobson (The Hobson & Holtz Report), Amelia Torode (VCCP) and Paul Alexander (Beyond Analysis) – with more to follow.

A Short Review of BrandWatch’s Dashboard

I had a demo of BrandWatch recently, ably accompanied by Seb Hempstead (Account Exec), and was impressed both by their current Web Dashboard and it’s forthcoming incarnation. BrandWatch are serious data-heads. Having started out building monitoring systems for the British Government, they struck out on their own, creating a high quality social media monitoring and tracking system of their own…

Social Media Monitoring Companies Don’t Use Twitter

I decided to ‘follow’ every SMM company I could find on Twitter yesterday. I was amazed at how many of the 80 or so companies I looked up either weren’t listed by their company name or had just a handful of followers. What are they thinking?! With a few notable exceptions (such as WeAreSocial, who [...]

Free Social Media Monitoring Tools

There is now a prolieration of free social media monitoring tools online. Some, like Google Alerts, are tried and tested mainstream tools. Others, like SocialMention, are moving towards genuine realtime social monitoring. Here are a few that have crossed our path in the past week… We’ll be posting a much more complete list in future [...]

BT Customer Services Turns to Twitter

BT has finally followed the inexorable shift towards realtime, responsive customer services and opened a BT Twitter account for customer services. BT Care asks vistors “Have a question? Follow us and let us help!” and it looks very much like that’s how it works.