Tag Archives: monitoring

Social-Media Monitoring Problem: Dredging Up Ancient Garbage

I’ve grown increasingly frustrated with social-media monitoring tools, and their inability to filter out old content or spam bots using my old content. It’s very easy for me to assess a social-media tool by querying my own name (Nalts). I know instantly what content about me is new, and can recognize old content that has been repurposed by spam sites, which often grab my old blogs and video descriptions to fool search engines and people into thinking they’re not autobots.

Here’s an example from my Google Alerts, which I am about to discontinue. None of this is new! Even Google can’t determine what’s old anymore... and some of this links to my own blog posts that are ancient. This makes me question the prevailing myth that Google will overtake the social-media monitoring landscape with its own free solution.

Is there a solution? Even the best social-media tools can’t seem to discern between legitimate recent posts (of me anyway) that are on my sites or others.

How to Search YouTube Comments

It’s now easy to search YouTube comments without diving into each video and clicking “show all comments.” In a vital move, Google now invites you to search ALL COMMENTS here. Nice job, Google & YouTube. I’ve been begging for this, and with this and the Twitter partnership… you’ve become a real-time engine again.

I can only imagine you’re now developing something that will make social-media monitoring tools obsolete.

YouTube comments are another channel to mine for your brand (or ego surf). We can only hope that Google will provide some advanced filtering. For instance, eliminating spam or allowing us to search by “influence” as defined by the video or commenter.

search nalts comments

Although YouTube doesn’t make it easy to spam comments, it’s now quite easy to add noise to this channel. For instance, I can type “Starburst” over and over again in various comments, and Starbucks might think it’s suddenly getting buzz. Or I could ask all of my viewers to type “Citibank sucks” in the comments, and that might set off alarms in the secret Citibank monitoring cabin.

But we can trust Mother Google to solve for that.

Brands Can Tinker With Twitter: So Let’s Tinker With 7/8/9 Gathering…

As I sail into full-time consulting around social media (with video being the obvious focus, given its visceral nature), I can’t help but also hear brands desperate for a Twitter strategy. My former colleague, Marc Monseau, who manages the Johnson & Johnson blog, made headlines for using Twitter to fix a Motrin ad (see AdAge story if you’re registered or learn more here).

Today I learned via my beloved AdAge 3-minute video report about Tinker, which orients information around brands so if you’re Yoplait you could have a live section where people’s tweets are syndicated on your site (sanatized from obscenities and competitors). Okay- maybe there’s not a surging demand for a real-time yogurt discussion, but still worth a glance…

This is especially useful for events because Twitter is oriented around people and not events… so unless everyone uses #BoringDigitalConference on their tweets, it can be hard to surf the microblogs from attendees…. so….

gathering789

Here’s a Tinker event I’ve created to help facilitate the discussions around the large YouTube gathering in NYC, culminating on the weekend after 7/8/09 (it’s dubbed Gathering789 and other terms). Now various tweets can be connected to similar tweets (even with #tag variations), and the dates can easily be found. Endless possibilities here, and it still links to the 789 website that has videos and blog posts.

I tried a Tinker search for my former brand, Propecia, and it was interesting. Sure you can do a real-time Twitter search at Twitter (which is how I kept informed about the buzz of my Merck departure), but this can help organize and syndicate the brand-specific mentions/events in a more organized format.

Social-Media Monitoring in Real Life: 9 Beaches

So here’s a real-time gold-standard case study of social-media monitoring and action in just hours.

We’re at this 9Beaches resort in Bermuda (wifeofnalts found it via The Today Show and it’s far more casual and affordable than most places in Bermuda).

I did a small video this morning on my responseofnalts channel, and was planning on doing a better Bermuda video recap in the next couple days for the Nalts channel. I wanted to get rights to the song from 9Beaches website first (do do do do doooo). 

The cell phone rang after my afternoon nap, and it was the 9 Beaches general manager. Seems his US agency, Madigan Pratt & Associates had picked up the video presumably through monitoring technology or alerts. He was going to invite us back to the resort, until he realized we were still here. The rest of this story is in this video.

Ironic that I’ve been writing about video for 3 years and never used vlogging to do a blog post here, eh?