FUMSI has two excellent articles on monitoring social media sources for industry information and competitive intelligence.
Evolution In Source Evaluation: Using Social Media Data , by Emily Wheeler and Samara Omundson
These two information professionals developed a framework for evaluating the influence of social media tools such as Technorati, Digg, Blogpulse, and applying that framework to assessing mentions of a product. They began by identifing metrics that could be indicators of the influence of various information sources. For example, at Twitter the indicators would be followers, following, and listed. They next applied the metrics to media sources to develop ranges of values and to begin to analyze the nature of the influence. "We ultimately identified five Influence Attributes: Reach, Buzz, Engagement, Content and Audience".
The authors show how to apply the Influence Ranking Framework in their analysis of e-book readers that were mentioned in blogs.
Pharmaceutical industry: a discovery-led approach to social media by Daniel Ghinn (Jan 2010)
Pharmaceutical companies monitor the conversations on the Web about health for market research and product development.
The author describes two approaches: "'external discovery', where information about conversations taking place is measured and analysed remotely; and 'internal discovery', where an environment owned or managed by the pharmaceutical company hosts social media activity. Both approaches are necessary in order to gain a complete picture."
There are some tools for social media monitoring: Radian6 and ScanBuzz, developed for the pharmaceutical industry by Medimix. Activity analytical tools can be employed too - YouTube Insights and Google Analytics.
Posted by Gwen at January 21, 2010 03:53 PM