Last week I posted about Denis Masseni’s report “Why Schools are Spooked by Social Media.”
An interesting component of this report was on social media monitoring. That is, monitoring the internet for mentions of a particular keyword (such as your school). This is a good way to take defensive action if negative mentions occur and to keep tab of positive mentions.
In his report, Denis described two free online applications that allow you to search the internet for any reference of your keyword.
Social Mention (socialmention.com)
Social Mention can scan a range of social media outlets such as blogs, comments, images, videos, audio etc.
When you search a keyword, along with your results of mentions on the internet, you get a display of sentiment. That is, what percentage of occurrences are positive and what percentage are negative. It uses a linguistics processing tool to analyse the words and phrases for positive and negative language.
Social mention also provides information on who the top users are of your keyword search. Interestingly, for my school (Leopold Primary School) that was me!
This tool is popular with businesses and also members of the wider community who want to keep track of a certain topic. Give it a try.
The second social media monitoring tool that Denis mentioned in his report was,
Google Alerts (www.google.com/alerts)
Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic. You simply type in your keyword, select what you want to search and when you want to be emailed.
Whether or not schools are using social medias themselves, it seems that it would be a good idea for schools to have these social media monitoring tools in place. They are a good way to nip any problems that occur in the bud and monitor what your students are doing in cyberspace.
Check out, Actionly (http://www.actionly.com) a Social Media Monitoring dashboard and listening platform. On Actionly you can monitor what people across various social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, Flickr, Youtube, News and Google Buzz. We have a comprehensive Social Media dashboard, automated reporting and in depth Analytics package. Give us a try! Thanks!
-Sam
(http://www.actionly.com)
Great idea for using social monitoring. I use it to monitor those things I am interested in and my own digital foot print but hadn’t considered using it this way.