By Chris Lee

Buzz monitoring – gaining an overview over what is being said about a particular brand or product online - is essential to modern marketing. Organisations can now accurately monitor the impact of their online marketing campaigns and quantify the number of viewings, re-tweets and comments on Facebook, for example, that they’re achieving, as well as gauging the sentiment of those campaigns. Some are also using buzz monitoring as part of their customer services mix, responding quickly to disgruntled customers’ comments online.

Although some rudimentary analysis can be achieved using free sites such as Addictomatic, SocialMention and Ubervu, there are a host of paid-for ‘professional’ packages which enable brands to gain a deeper analysis of their brand or products’ online buzz performance.

Mark Redgrave is chief executive officer of OpenAmplify, which describes itself as a “semantic Web platform” that analyses content and extracts its meaning in terms of the topics, brands, people, perspectives, emotions, actions and timescales expressed in text. The information can then be used by companies to make their applications and services more intelligent, Redgrave says.

The end of the road?

While OpenAmplify’s Redgrave believes buzz monitoring can help guide decision making on aspects from marketing and communications right through to product development, he also believes that too many buzz monitoring tools fail to differentiate themselves other than by their pricing and vendors are, in his words, cannibalising their own market.

“The early adopters of buzz monitoring were easily impressed by cool user interfaces and groovy graphics, but things have changed,” he told NMK. “Users now understand that it’s not about pretty pictures and how information is presented, but what is that information telling me. People want actionable insights that will deliver genuine value to their business.”

Buzz light years ahead

Redgrave believes that only the more intuitive monitoring tool providers will survive and that the monitoring market will be a lot smaller in just two years’ time, and those players will look quite different to now.

“Undoubtedly there will be some monitoring tools in the future,” he said. “But it is only by delivering deeper, actionable insights that listening platforms will survive.”

Redgrave argues that this means exploring technologies like semantics, which he says “can deliver a much more sophisticated analysis of online conversations – providing insights into themes, topics and sentiment as well as identifying key influencers across thousands of sites and millions of pieces of content.”

The surviving companies will focus on actionable insights, Redgrave argues, and will become more immersed within businesses.

“They’re set to play a larger role in shaping marketing strategy, supporting customer relationship management (CRM) and driving sales,” he concluded. “As social media continues to grow and evolve, effective buzz monitoring is going to play a key role in supporting business success.”