By Greg Hazley
As technology improves, the scope and volume of content that monitoring services can process is rising exponentially, in some cases to staggering numbers.
In the case of traditional outlets like broadcast TV or radio, the speed of search results and depth of tracking has greatly increased, while the rapidly expanding ocean of content in social media has forced monitoring companies to retool infrastructure and keep pace with the flood.
In either media, a tech-wrought versatility has opened up new markets for PR services providers that invested in infrastructure and, in the case of social media, saw the boom coming.
Critical Mention's monitoring dashboard. |
Broadcasting monitoring company Critical Mention, this month, is rolling out a major upgrade to its CriticalTV monitoring platform, 4.0, which tracks television content in the top markets across the country. Its capabilities are now such that it ingests 27 hours of media every 60 seconds.
That’s more media per minute than YouTube is getting uploads per minute, which is close to 24 hours per minute, noted CEO Sean Morgan.
"We are getting much deeper with clients than was typical," said Morgan. "They are tracking their management, boards, products, competitors, but also their legal issues, lobbying, human resource issues."
Technological improvements are meeting client demand, meaning more data can be searched more rapidly.
In addition to the speed of queries, key additions to the new platform from CM are the ability to vary the scope of a search from a single TV market to a global search, on-the-fly editing of video clips which lets users choose the start and finish of a clip based on the transcript text of what’s being said, as well as email and RSS alerts for mentions.
Allowing users to vary the scope by market also allows Critical Mention to open a wider pool of potential clients beyond its 600-plus client base. Such a strategy has fueled growth of tech-savvy PR services start-ups like Vocus, which have used the small business market as a vast opportunity to gain customers overlooked (and priced out) by rivals.
"Because we have this capability of really ‘narrowscoping’ results, we’re also able to accommodate any entity’s budget and needs," said Morgan. A small non-profit in Hawaii, for example, could subscribe to content only in the Hawaii DMA. A politician could buy a package from his local markets and, perhaps, adjacent states.
Morgan said the versatility has opened up its services to regionally focused, boutique PR firms, as well, where in the past, only larger agencies could afford the services of the big monitoring shops.
Social Media Monitoring’s Inflection Point
The spike in volume of data is attributable both to increased adoption by the public, as well as the transition from companies and brands from a listening pattern to more engagement.
"We started to realize that the application we have was not going to be able to scale with that," said Geoff Farris, executive VP of Visible Technologies, a social media monitoring and consulting company which released a significant upgrade in its flagship product on Oct. 27. "As all of this data started coming in, we realized that we were at this inflection point and a lot of the applications that are out there are going to hit a wall. We decided we need to build something that would take on this challenge."
Farris said there were three key challenges to building a new platform essentially from the ground up.
First, the global nature of communications today makes multiple language translation necessary. "It’s a global problem that people are trying to solve, not just a local, traditional problem," said Farris.
Second, a monitoring platform has to be scalable to the huge volumes of data. "Ten billion posts for Twitter this year, Facebook creating this massive amount of data – we had to be able to make sure we could scale," he said.
Finally, tracking the data alone is not longer the end of expectations for monitoring platforms. Clients, whether they are a PR department or a sales or marketing division, are looking for specific information and tone. Sentiment is now key to monitoring results. "We built the application to surface things so that you’re not just staring at a screen and the data is just flying by you in a river," he said. "That’s not acceptable."
Technology was key to incorporating sentiment into Visible’s new platform. The company has used five years of data which had been manually scored by staffers to "teach" its computer models to gauge sentiment in content, a move which takes the human element out of the process and provides a more automated and accurate method," Farris said.
He added that the other key to adding value to monitoring data is allowing it to be integrated into other data sources – essentially letting a client take its social media data and plug it into other information like sales outcomes. |