Abstract
It is only rarely possible to keep track of the entirety of the field of Social Media: tools for monitoring this communicative territory have been developed only recently. Each of these tools has its own algorithm and particular features, i.e. they measure different things and present their findings in their own idiosyncratic way.
What, then, is the potential of these tools in research on media reception and media use? How can they be employed for sentiment analysis or opinion mining? What is their contribution to the identification of so-called ‘issues’, i.e. companies’ communication risks? How can consumer trends for innovation be identified?
The purpose of this chapter is to propose answers to these questions by proceeding in three steps. An evaluation of the major social media monitoring tools is followed by a systematic analysis of each tool’s range of applications in the explanatory context outlined above. Finally some potential or existing practical applications in corporate communication (use cases) are explored.
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Notes
- 1.
Communication Regimes refers especially to the third part of Meyers definition “…a system in which the types of communication are tightly coupled to the production system in which they are embedded.”
- 2.
Experts define trends based on their own authority and experience.
- 3.
Consumers, users, critics, etc.
- 4.
A term relation identifies a number of terms and the correlations among them. Tag clouds indicate the frequency of a term’s use by varying the font size or color-coding the terms, thus providing a good overview of relevant topics. For graphic representations in the form of semantic networks the strength of correlation between terms is calculated, thus showing not only the terms themselves but also the varying strength of their interconnections. This is especially relevant for trend analysis when the temporal element is incorporated into the representation, showing the dynamic semantic development of term correlations, i.e. how an issue’s pertinency increases or decreases over time.
- 5.
The most commonly used operators are “AND”, “OR” and “NOT”.
- 6.
To date, automated tagging in Radian6 is only possible for English-language texts.
- 7.
The world’s top 100 companies sorted by gross revenue, including e.g. Kodak, Dell and PepsiCo.
- 8.
The provider’s predecessor company Cogisum Intermedia AG had to file for bankruptcy, but is now back in business as Cogia GmbH.
- 9.
Radian6 is especially strong in the English-speaking world, but it also permanently generates new German-language sources. The provider does not specify the exact number of German-language sources.
- 10.
Apart from the interactive quantitative presentation, the program also provides access to the original sources and tag cloud view.
- 11.
Cogia offers such a list for a fee, however the provider cautions that their list focuses on sources from Germany/the EU.
- 12.
Crawlers are programs used for searching and indexing the entire content of a website, making it possible for future searches to access additional “historical” data retrieved by the crawler. APIs scan entries in social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook or YouTube for specific search terms and integrate the results into the search engine circuit. Both sets of data are then refined by an extractor that performs author analyses, creates text information tables, scans blogs and bulletin boards for authors and posts and provides structural information for indexing. Supported file formats are: HTML, TXT, PDF, archive files (ZIP, RAR), PS, PPT, MS Word, and MS Excel files.
- 13.
I.e. the terms used to define tonality as positive or negative.
- 14.
Such as Salesforce and others for Radian6; for IBM’s CCI, ERP, data warehousing and deep data mining tools and others.
- 15.
Customer e-mail, clicks in service portals, memoranda or protocols of call center conversations, etc.
- 16.
The divergence from classical media resonance analyses is discernible both in the total number of stakeholder communications and in the number of scanned stakeholder groups.
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Grüblbauer, J., Haric, P. (2013). Social Media Monitoring Tools as Instruments of Strategic Issues Management. In: Friedrichsen, M., Mühl-Benninghaus, W. (eds) Handbook of Social Media Management. Media Business and Innovation. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-28897-5_39
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