Tuesday, April 3, 2012

Social + News Monitoring, together for the first time. | DataSift Blog

3rd April 2012

by Tim Barker, Chief Marketing Officer @ DataSift (@timbarker)

Today we’re proud to announce a partnership with NewsCred – enabling companies for the first time to be able to understand, track and analyze news-articles as they flow through the Social Web.

You can read the coverage, press release and visit our sign-up page and pinterest board for some examples, but I wanted to put this in perspective as a marketeer who’s struggled with challenges of analyzing and understanding this for the last few years, and why this is a big deal for us at DataSift.

In my previous life as the head of marketing for Salesforce.com Europe, I could clearly see the impact that social was having on how customers expect to engage with companies, and how employees want to collaborate using social platforms. As well as creating a vision and products for the market (called the Social Enterprise) the imperative was also that every function, every team in Salesforce would need to align and rally around social.

This is where I first saw the chasm that every company needs to cross to understand and evolve into a social organization; and why platforms that can integrate traditional-media with social-media have become critical to help companies transform into socially-savvy businesses.

Nowhere is this social-transformation more apparent and challenging than in the world of Public Relations and Corporate Communication. If you’re in a company large enough to have its own PR team, you’ll know they are on-point to engage with market-influencers to carry the corporate message out to the market. Of course, in a market where everyone has influence (and a Klout score), identifying who in the market is a social-influencer for your business has become critical. But increasingly the gap has always been – how do you evolve how you measure your impact socially. This is where we need to fuse-together traditional-metrics with social-metrics to get a clearer picture. For me, I think of this as a 3rd generation of how companies can measure their social impact and influence for communications:

1) First there were News Clippings Services: Many companies today will subscribe to a news-clipping service. These are born from the era of “paper and glue”, giving you a summary of the news-output around your company or brand. Useful to know, but not actionable.

2) Then Social Media Monitoring: Next up, PR/Marketing teams were some of the first to embrace Social Media Monitoring solutions to help them understand the social-conversations around their company, products, and competitors. “Share of Conversation” is becoming a benchmark metric for an increasing number of companies, enabling them to see how their brand is perceived.

The problem is, there’s never been a way to correlate the “news clippings output” world with the “social media monitoring” world. Put another way – you can know that a killer article was published about your company, but trying to get an insight into how that news was shared, what the conversation around it was socially, how it impacted your “share of conversation”, or who made this news go-viral – have been near-impossible to measure.

What the combination of NewsCred and DataSift provides is a bridge between the news-production and the social-consumption of news. So now, you can monitor for articles that mention your company, products, or any topic you want to track, then measure the social-distribution and engagement around the news.

In the above example you can see the:

- Social Reach: How many people does the news reach (x-axis)

- Social Resonance: How many people are engaging by retweeting and commenting on the news (y-axis)

- Sentiment of Conversation around the News: How does the sentiment of public conversation change as the news goes-viral. (color)

- Influencer (Klout) Trends: What’s the weight of Klout-influence sharing each article (size)

And best of all, what we provide is a platform to integrate and embed this into your existing social and news applications.

We’re pretty excited about the potential for this. Let us know what you think. And if you’re interested in adding NewsCred content into your DataSift sources, get in touch!

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