Social Media Monitoring Tools
This week, I wrote an essay and recorded a video about various social media monitoring tools, in the context of watching the NESN (New England Sports Network) website.
I have reprinted my essay here in its entirety, except for the graphics. Social media monitoring tools are good. But they’re not great, yet.
Social Media Brand Report – NESN – Module 03 ICM 524
Company Brand
New England Sports Network (NESN) is a regional television channel with a wide and varied social media presence. The industry is cable (Xfinity) media; their home page is: https://nesn.com/, which is a WordPress blog.
The television channel’s coverage is of nationally-televised (yet regionally-based) sports such as Red Sox baseball, and local events such as North Attleboro, Massachusetts track and field. There are related stories, about sports but outside the region, which round out the coverage.
The specific campaign is the coverage of area sports on various social media outlets.
Brand Sentiment
According to Topsy, brand sentiment is generally mixed but leans toward positive. The sentiment score for the past month (after a survey of over 9,500 mentions) is 54/100. Social Mention more or less confirms these findings, although that service found more positive than negative mentionings, and turned in a far more impressive 7:1 ratio of positive to negative comments. However, just like on Topsy, the majority of mentionings were found to be neutral ones.
Retweet Rank showed that NESN garners a lot of retweets. They’re in the 98th percentile. This is probably something you should expect, with over 100,000 Twitter followers.
Social Campaign Initiative
The brand’s social campaign appears to be not only to promote NESN and increase its viewership, but it may also be to increase viewership on other Xfinity properties. Further, there seem to be attempts to get viewers to click on advertisements for an M-rated video game (Murdered).
Standard tweets are partly to spread NESN’s own content, but also to spread content about related persons, such as players and potential players for the New England Patriots and the Boston Red Sox. A typical tweet (on June 3, 2014) is as follows:
NESN1:36pm via Twitter Web Client These #Patriots veterans are on the bubble.go.nesn.com/1h4VmfQ Which one(s) won’t make the Week 1 roster?
Their Facebook campaign appears to be nearly (if not completely) 100% fed by their own site’s home page.
The same story about new soccer uniforms appears on the NESN home page, in their Twitter stream, and on their Facebook page.
Quantitative Data from Social Media Monitoring Tools
NESN does not hide its quantitative data, providing a link at: https://nesn.com/nesn-web-traffic-statistics/.That page provides links to a number of sites which collect quantitative data.
- Chartbeat for NESN.com
- Compete for NESN.com (required a login)
- comScore for NESN.com (required a login)
- Google Ad Planner for NESN.com (required a login)
- Quantcast for NESN.com (https://www.quantcast.com/nesn.com)
Chartbeat presented a number of vanity metrics, and provided a comparison to the previous day’s metrics.
Topsy had no linking from NESN, but their take on the site is still of interest.
However, Topsy’s compilations of mentionings are perhaps too inclusive. It includes some data it is misapplying. For example, the following tweet shows up in Topsy’s report, even though it has nothing to do with NESN, New England, or sports:
Adams @buyharddrive #7: WD My Passport Pro 2TB portable RAID storage with integrated Thunderbolt cable (WDBRMP0020DBK-NESN): WD My…amzn.to/1n9EYu2
Qualitative Data
So in a way, you can cobble together qualitative data from some of the above-mentioned metrics.
Social Mention’s compilations of mentionings and then parsing them out by positive, negative, and neutral sentiments can provide some qualitative information about how people online perceive a brand. However, some of the mentionings are likely being misfiled.
Huh?
But their list of negative mentions is a mystery. Perhaps the term ‘pitch’ is showing up as a negative? Because otherwise I cannot see why the following from Reddit is negative at all:
GAME THREAD: Boston Red Sox (27-29) @ Cleveland Indians (27-30) – June 02, 2014 Boston Red Sox @ Cleveland Indians First Pitch Media Feed Channel Subreddits 06:05 PM CT Video CLE WKYC 3, SportsTime Ohio /r/WahoosTipi Weather BOS NESN /r/RedSox P…
Admittedly, this kind of parsing of mentionings is inexact at the best of times, for the software likely does not have a sarcasm detector, either. And, just like on Topsy, anything with NESN in it was fair game for the software, even though the first hit is for the sale of a hard drive that just so happens to have that particular combination of letters in its serial number.
Brand Reputation on Social Media and Social Media Monitoring Tools
Social Mention seems to best outline the brand’s reputation, and it appears to be overwhelmingly positive. You can see this by inspecting the quantitative retweet metric (very high) and Social Mention’s own qualitative measurements.
Even Topsy’s overly inclusive listings don’t seem to tip the scales into the negative. It might not be beloved, but NESN is certainly well-liked on social media. Even negative stories don’t seem to hurt its reputation, as its followers on social media seem savvy enough to not want to shoot the messenger if their beloved teams lose.
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