I’m speaking at Monitoring Social Media 2010 London today and presentations are great ( mine is posted in the post previous to this one). one piece of news is the Announcement about BrandWatch. More later.

Here’s a playlist of the Small Business Monitoring Panel I spoke on today http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=476DB8826EB7AFDA

I’ll also be speaking shortly on Social Media ROI.

Main release

DURRANTS INVESTS IN BRANDWATCH

Durrants, the UK’s leading media intelligence business, has taken a stake in Brighton-based social media monitoring company Brandwatch after being “blown away” by the company during a trial to find a social media monitoring partner.

The deal will enable Brandwatch, which already operates in 10 languages, to expand its current offer in the US and extend its service to cover Russia and China.

The investment in Brandwatch is the latest in a series of big deals in the social media monitoring space as companies gear up to tackle the challenges of monitoring brand conversations and reputation online. The social media marketing industry is growing by 34% a year and is expected to be worth $3.1bn a year by 2014.*

The investment comes after Durrants went to the market looking for a specialist social media monitoring company and Brandwatch came out on top following a rigorous trial period alongside several other leading international monitoring firms.

Jeremy Thompson, Durrants MD, said: “During the trial it quickly became clear that Brandwatch was head and shoulders above the competition. We were blown away by their relevant and timely coverage, strong account management and technical support, robust platform and user friendly service. It really was a case of liking the company so much we wanted to invest in it.”

As well as the investment, Brandwatch’s social media monitoring data will be used by Durrants’ sister company Metrica, the award-winning global media analysis and evaluation company to track brands and conversations online and offer an enhanced social media service.

“There is a baffling amount of choice for PRs when it comes to tracking brand or client conversations online and our own research tells us that most PRs find social media monitoring one of their biggest challenges.** We’re confident that Brandwatch, working alongside Metrica, will help PRs cut through the confusion and provide meaningful analytics,” Thompson said.

Giles Palmer, Brandwatch CEO, said: “When it comes to monitoring social media it is important to find a supplier and data you trust. We’ve always been confident about what we provide but this move by Durrants provides a ringing endorsement of our service.”

“We operate in a competitive space and I’m very proud that we were able to beat off stiff competition from several North American providers and managed to impress Durrants so much they wanted to invest in the company. The investment comes at an explosive time in the social media monitoring market and will help us push our product to the very top of the global pile.”

Notes to Editors:

About Brandwatch:

Brandwatch (www.brandwatch.com) is one the world’s leading tools for monitoring and capturing social media. Today, social networks are a massive indicator of consumer influence and brand positioning online. So for companies to know what and where discussions are taking place surrounding their brand online is imperative. Brandwatch captures, digests and translates this data into meaningful and useful information; armed with this information, Marketers and PR professionals can structure and track the direction and focus of their social media campaigns. Launched in August 2007 Brandwatch is used by customers around the world to monitor, capture and analyse trends in social media.

About Durrants, Metrica and Gorkana:

Durrants, the market leader in media monitoring (www.durrants.com), Metrica (www.metrica.net), the global media analysis and evaluation specialist and Gorkana, the UK’s most trusted media/journalist database and community network (www.gorkana.com) are part of Discovery Group. This latest investment in Brandwatch supports Discovery Group’s ambition to deliver greater insight to the PR and Marketing communities. The integration of intelligence from these services will deliver unique insights to help companies plan, monitor and analyse their PR more effectively than ever before.

Discovery Group is based on Old Street near the Silicon Roundabout, an area of East London where more than 100 tech and design companies have set up over the last five years. Prime Minister David Cameron recently announced that he wants to establish an East London Technology City and lure Google, Facebook and Microsoft to new offices in Olympic Park, a few tube stops from the Silicon Roundabout.

Metrica was acquired by Durrants in October 2009 and Gorkana was acquired by Durrants in April 2010.

For more information and interviews please contact:

Giles Palmer
giles@brandwatch.com
+44 1273 234290

Richard Bagnall
Richard@metrica.net
+44 20 7664 0800
*Forrester Research

**Gorkana survey of 205 Social Media Panel Event attendees, June 2010

Here’s my 2 presentations for next Wednesday’s Monitoring Bootcamp in London.   In both presentations I refer back to relevant parts of the Scribd doc on How to Build Your Own Social Monitoring Dashboard DRAFT which you can download now (in fact you can download all 3 files now).

Of course, the PowerPoint presentations are meant more to keep me focused as I present the information that is lately in the Scribed document, but more importantly, in my own mind.  I purposely avoided getting too detailed as I’ll talk to each slide, and answer questions, as I’m going over the presentations- looking forward to  a great week in the UK.

Here’s the Scribed Document again

How to Build Your Own Social Media Monitoring Service -Marshall Sponder – Webmetricsguru_dot_com_3!31!2010_V2

My next posts will probably be in London and I will try, internet permitting, to cover Monitoring Social Media Bootcamp.

My first two posts in this series on Comparing Social Media Monitoring Platforms for coverage of Social Media Week NYC and Comparing Social Media Monitoring Platforms on content about Social Media Week NYC 10 examined volume and media types captured by each platform – with very different results in each case.

But what about Sentiment?

Radian6 – 81% Positive and 19% Negative Sentiment

I used “Widget Keywords” which is to say, I told Radian6 to use anything that had “social media week” in it for sentiment analysis.  I could have used Topic Profile keywords which would have broken down the results differently, similar to what Techrigy does with “Tone”.

Alterian/SM2/Techrigy – 91% Positive and 9% negative sentiment

Considering the number of posts each platform considered, the results for sentiment, on the face of it – between Radian6 and Techrigy are not as far off as I’d thought they would be.

Sysomos – had 76% Positive and 1% Negative with 23% neutral - again, not as far off as I thought they’d be.

But Brandwatch was really far off from the rest with only 1% positive and 1% negative – and the rest of the data was “neutral”.

It’s clear Brandwatch is much more strict with assigning sentiment – maybe that’s good – -not sure yet.

Biz360 had 16% Positive and 4% Negative with 81% Neutral  - quite a difference from the rest.

Of course, we need to look at what each platform considers to be negative vs. positive.  More to the point – would the same content be found in each platform to be negative – or might a negative post or comment in one platform be considered to be positive by another?

Whew ..that is a hot !!!  How far off can these platforms be ?  Remember – same exact query (Social Media Week New York City) same time period.

Radian6 – none of the 22 tweets that were flagged negative -  were actually negative  when I read then visually.

Look – Radian6, to their credit – added Sentiment Analysis by keywords just last month. I want to say it’s not the platform’s fault that people (me) don’t know how to configure or use it might be intended.

On the other hand, I put in “Social Media Week” as the keyword to do sentiment around – on a topic profile about Social Media Week NYC  – so …. you figure it out.    Let me put it another way – if you really care about the accuracy of your results around sentiment – best to look at them by hand and reclassify them to what you think they are – Radian6 may not be smart enough to tell sentiment.  There- I tried to be nice.

Alterian/SM2/Techrigy – total wash out - most of the results don’t make sense – only one or two actually have any connection with Social Media Week New York City – and they’re not negative – at least, not negative about Social Media Week -

I realize the Sentiment Analysis part of  Techrigy is going to be updated on February 1st, and it will be interesting to look at these results – then.

People I know at Techrigy have been very nice to me and bend backwards to please – and I really appreciate their support for me over the last two years -  on the other hand, as an analyst, a blogger whose opinion people respect in this area, for this query – the results Techrigy returned were less than useless – they actually are a detractor.  I’m glad there’s an update in a few days – Sentiment Analysis needs an update, badly.

BrandWatch – 2 negative results – both were negative

Yes, let’s call a “spade a spade” - these two tweets do have a negative tone - look for yourself.   Congratulations Giles Palmer – you  and your team won this challenge -  maybe the English got this one right – sentiment analysis -  at least in this case – the results make sense.

Sysomos - the sentiment results were generally good -  I did not find any negative blog posts according to Sysomos, so I looked at the positive and neutral posts and I found them to be reasonable in their classification of Social Media Week Content – many of the Mashable posts about Social Media Week were listed  and it’s fair to read that as “positive” since they support and give attention to Social Media Week.

Unlike Brandwatch, Sysomos didn’t find any negative tweets and classified them all as neutral - perhaps that is not far from the truth – I would rather have a result be classified as neutral than have it be flagged as positive or negative by the system when it’s clearly not, having looked at it visually.   Sysomos treated news stories in mainstream media as either neutral or positive – again, Sysomos assignment of sentiment was reasonable – so maybe it’s a tie between Brandwatch and Sysomos.

What about Biz360? – the negative sentiment selections were pretty poor and looked like the same things that Sysomos flagged as positive, Biz360 flagged as negative.

It’s really hard to imagine most of what was picked up by Biz360 could be negative – just look at the titles of the content it selected.  I do like that Biz360 qualifies the reach of a piece of content while the other platforms that are being looked at here do not offer that feature, today.

Taking this all in – I need to say that I seriously question a “marketer” who builds a Social Media Monitoring platform is going to come up with a satisfactory solution for many of the things that are really important to measure – and to accurately gauge.

Radian6 is getting better – but the problem is, as far as sentiment goes – there’s too much that has to be done on a configuration level to get sentiment right – I know they  will continue to improve – but they also come from a “marketing” background and the Flash Interface, that makes their product look better than the others, is also, at time, frustrating to work with.

Alterian/Techrigy/SM2 – well …. they know Sentiment isn’t their strong point – they have a good technology and have improved alot over the years – yet they too, are built from a marketing perspective – and that can be a problem, because marketers aren’t that good at technology – that’s the same issue as Biz360, in my opinion – but look – I could be wrong – hell, I hope I am.

Brandwatch – I don’t know what their origins are – but I have met and spoken to Giles Palmer – who founded Brandwatch several years ago – and they consider themselves to be the #1 platform in Europe – their sentiment analysis seems to be better than most, based on my experience with it so far – and from what Giles tells me – they do a lot of work to make it and keep it that way.

Sysomos, the more I work with it, the more I like – Sysomos was built by a programmer and a university- the University of Toronto – and their backend is able to splice and dice data very well – Sysomos is more like a programming think tank that grew into marketing – yes,  their interface could improve – but the sentiment analysis and noise suppression are excellent.

So, there you have it – Sentiment Analysis – buyer beware – for the time being, if your going to have large amounts of data you need to score with automated sentiment analysis – I think you’ll be best off with Sysomos or Brandwatch, all things being equal.

And look, I’m open to discussion and reexamining my results (I don’t know a lot of what goes on behind the interface)- clearly – a lot more deep dives into the data of all the platforms are needed – but that’s precisely what most Social Media Monitoring Platform make it hard to do – and yes, a couple of analysts types have looked at these platforms, including Forrester and Nathan Gilliatt who will be at Monitoring Social Media Bootcamp with me in London in two months and a sample of his ebook is encouraging (and the new book he’s working on is going to be even better).

Nathan’s approach, as far as I can tell – is to look at these platforms more as a “buyers” guide  – similar to what Phil Kemelor does with Web Analytics platforms for CMSWatch.

My approach is hands on – how well does these platforms work for what we use them for?

I don’t think anyone else in the field actually does that - and this post alone – shows that.

By the way, if you want to get far more than even what I can write here – hire me to help you – and please join me at Monitoring Social Media Bootcamp in London on March 31st. 2010.

Tickets are on sale now.