It was with some delight, tempered by wry amusement, that I opened the PDF forwarded on by a colleague this week that announced a new service launched by Chong Newztel, the media monitoring firm. From the end of this month they are going to be monitoring the blogosphere as well as traditional media.
Why delight? Announcements like this are another indication of the influence that social media is having on the communications environment. They also influence the thinking of senior managers, by ‘legitimizing’ the business reality of social media conversations, and thereby support public sector communicators efforts to engage with new media.
Chong describes the service thus:
To reflect the ever-accelerating news cycle, Chong Newztel has designed and built a digital platform from which we can monitor and aggregate content from weblogs, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Hence the wry amusement. This purpose built digital platform
sounds a lot like they have discovered RSS. They are offering the service at no extra charge (other than an increase in the number of pages you receive if you do feature in a contretemps in the blogosphere), which is terrific because you should already be doing this yourself.
Earlier this year I posted a simple tutorial on how to monitor blogs for mentions of your agency. It would take half an hour, at most, to set this up in either an online or a desktop reader.
By all means, use the agency services if you are already a subscriber, but relying on them would be foolish. The whole point of social media is to get in there, engage, and understand — not just sit back and think that you can outsource the monitoring function.
The BuzzMonitor
For larger agencies, or those with a higher public profile, you may want to consider something a little more powerful and sophisticated. Shortly after its public release, we installed a version of the BuzzMonitor at SSC. A couple of us have been playing around with it to see how useful it is in the New Zealand context.
Essentially, it is a way to not only track comment across a stunningly large number of blogs, but also to tag and aggregate those comments into a coherent conversations. If I had any criticism at all, it would be that, for a small organization like ours, the impressive feature list is hopelessly underutilized.
Perhaps with more time, I could add feeds featuring keywords for all of the public service departments so that we could track all comment about government agencies and then forward the relevant material on to each department… Like the UK Central Office of Information does, as Che Tibby noted last month.
In any event, all of this boils down to the fact that you need to be in this space, one way or another. Follow the tutorial and roll your own feeds, or use a service like Chong to get your feet wet; just make sure that you are tracking social media. Chong can see the value in this, can you?
At Chong Newztel, we have created a media list of this country’s most important and influential blog sites, and we expect this list to grow rapidly.
Disclaimer: I am not a Chong subscriber and I am pretty sure that this blog is not on that list…
Photo: Kaptain Krispy Kreme. Hat tip Karen Jones for the Chong release.
5 Comments
It was with some delight that I read your post, as I am a regular reader.
I believe that web logs are an increasingly significant part of the media mix and many clients have requested this monitoring service over the past few months.
We simply see ourselves as an aggregator and some blogs have influential opinions that communicators cannot afford to ignore.
Thanks for commenting Leon. It’s good to see you guys engaging in this space and, hopefully, through your new service encouraging more communicators to follow suite.
Nice post, Jason…I agree with the “wry amusement”. A build-yer-own rss aggregator works really well.
If you need more…the World Bank has released its “buzzmonitor” under the GNU General Public License.
http://buzzm.worldbank.org/
Or, tweak your existing mainstream media monitoring platform to integrate RSS feeds. That’s what we do.
ciao
i.
Hi Jason,
On first pass over this posting I skipped over the Buzzmonitor comments. Just now I read it in full and went to the site. It resonated closely with what I ranted about at BarCampWellingtonNZEGov.
I was suggesting a news aggregator (similar to news.google.com) that could bring government/authorative and private space comments together to provide a common view of the various sides to an issue. Ranging up and down the long tail to provide visiblilty to the Transit NZ discussions in Auckland over roads and equally apply to the liver bellied spotted newt’s wildlife sanctuary proposed for just west of the median barrier on highway one north of Foxton.
Buzzmonitor seems to be a very good start to that aggregator. I plan to have a play with it myself.
I have thought harder on the problem and see major problems in my idea, among them:
I suppose they are all solvable, likely by a bit of “Wisdom of the Crowds”, but for someone with more free time than me.
Thanks for the thoughful comment, Andrew.
I agree that there are some issues to be worked through, but I wouldn’t go so far as to call them ‘major problems.’