Sorting the social wheat from the chaff

Our strategy executive Edward Crowley discovers a new way to gain insight into social media at SMWLDN…

Despite being firmly imbedded in most people's lives, social media is still relatively new. Its role in marketing, and indeed whether it has one, is still up for debate.

This is why the event ‘How to easily analyse mountains of social conversation and not pay a penny’ during Social Media Week London was so useful, as it did what it promised and was heavy on facts, light on fluff.

A short introduction to a tool called Overview kicked the event off. The program, developed by Associated Press, has been designed to help them sort through thousands of documents, such as the WikiLeaks dumps, in an attempt to bring order to chaos.

Jonathan Stray, the project lead for Overview, demonstrated its ability to help group documents and sort topics – an incredibly difficult but useful task in terms of social media.

Mick Conroy from Tempero then showed how this could be used to analyse tweets, helping you find both the big obvious topics of conversation, but also the smaller ones you may have missed. We then discussed how best to present this to clients, with the sort of graphs that get any strategist hot under the collar.

The event was not about the people giving the talk, but how they could help you do something new and interesting. Sadly this is rare in the world of marketing talks, so my thanks to both of them for one of the most interesting and useful events I have attended in a while.