Social media monitoring has moved on dramatically since our last UK social media monitoring conference in 2009. Monitoring is now an essential part of any social media PR and marketing strategy. Major brands are putting listening at the heart of their customer engagement activities and SMEs are using low-cost monitoring tools to make new connections and increase sales.

MSM10 is the UK’s only dedicated monitoring and engagement conference – featuring an unrivalled line-up of 20 social media monitoring experts, including Giles Palmer (Brandwatch), Rob Jardine (Carphone Warehouse), Loic Moisand (Synthesio), Gianandrea Facchini (BuzzDetector), Neville Hobson (WCG), Mark Rogers (Market Sentinel) and Keith Woods-Holder (GlideTechnologies).

What you’ll learn:

• How small businesses are using monitoring to increase sales
• How to plan and structure your monitoring activities
• How to measure ROI and customer engagement
• How Vodafone are using monitoring to boost customer engagement
• How Carphone Warehouse is using monitoring to foster customer advocacy
• How to use monitoring to crowd-source product development feedback
• The future of social media listening and engagement

MSM10 is a full-day event at the high-quality Cavendish Conference Centre, including breakfast, lunch, an Exhibition Area of monitoring tools& services, plus post-event networking drinks.

A limited number of Early Bird Tickets are available now here

Marshall has spent much of the last ten years trying out various social media monitoring solutions and sentiment is one of his favourite topics. In this workshop he aims to explain, in layman’s terms, how best to use the sentiment analysis features of social media monitoring tools, how to make sense of the results they produce and how to create value from this knowledge.

First off, Marshall will analyse the different approaches to sentiment from some of the leading monitoring solutions on the market, including Brandwatch, Scoutlabs, Radian6, Sysomos, Crimson Hexagon and Alterian (SM2). He will also demonstrate the differences in sentiment analysis results that these solutions can produce from essentially the same data. Scary stuff if you’re paying good money for comprehensive results!

One of the other key questions Marshall will be addressing in this session is: when is sentiment analysis useful and when isn’t it? He will explore which aspects of social media are best analysed numerically and identify those where sentiment can offer genuine insight and value, citing examples of how – right now – businesses are benefiting from each approach.

Marshall will also look at the accuracy of sentiment analysis. In other words, are the results produced related to the topics we’re interested in? And to what extent can results be improved by filtering out noise? He will demonstrate how to remove non-relevant search results and how, using your social media monitoring tools, you can construct queries that produce accurate results.

One of the hottest issues in sentiment analysis is always the “human” or “machine” intervention question. The question being, should we employ humans to analyse results and rate the sentiment, or should we develop sophisticated reading technology to rate sentiment for us. Marshall will offer his view on which works best (in various case studies) and suggest which option is best for what situations and how accurate you can expect the data from either option to be.

Finally, Marshall will prophesise what we should expect for sentiment analysis over the coming few years. As one of the world’s most experienced social media monitoring analysts – I would expect his opinion to be around 89% accurate ;)

Trackle's social media monitoring dashboard

Here’s a list of 8 free (or very cheap) social media monitoring tools we’ve tried out in the last few weeks. They are all pretty light-touch, but great for anyone starting out in social media monitoring – and a lot of fun into the bargain. (We also reviewed 5 top budget social media monitoring tools a few months back).

1) Trackle - Trackle started out as newsletter service, enabling anyone to create a free email newsletter on any topic, which would then be automatically created from web content and delivered regularly. They also offer a corporate version which includes a basic social media monitoring tool, which delivers daily updates to your inbox. The interface is quite cluttered and confusing, but it seems to work reasonably well (though some blog results weren’t captured in my test). There’s a rather nice “credibility” filter, which you can use to pinpoint the comments/posts from influential authors – though I’m not sure what basis this is judged on. Trackle offers a 30 day free trial, but it’s only $9.99 afterwards anyway. Within that price you can track 10 keywords/phrases. The Premium version is $99 for unlimited keywords.

2) TweepSearch - I recently wrote about Tweepsearch as a tool for finding influencers on Twitter very enthusiastically. The service enables you to analyse your Twitter followers to find out who’s influential on which topics. If you like playing with Boolean search queries to get really interesting results, it’s the Twitter Profile monitoring tool for you.

3) FollowerWonk – Just when I thought I’d found the best Twitter monitoring tool (see above), Marshall Sponder trumped me somewhat with followerwonk.com. It searches Twitter profiles for keywords in the same way as Tweepsearch, albeit with an easier interface (there’s a handy field for entering locations, rather than having to use search terms) but it produces the results in a more comprehensive way. As a result, one of the nicest features (which probably isn’t intended) is that you can easily copy and paste the results into a spreadsheet.

4) Klout - One of the most user-friendly and, dare I say it, more serious Twitter “influence monitoring” tools on the market is Klout.com. You can search for a specific topic and it gives you a list of the most influential Twitter users based on (what looks like) some fairly sophisticated mapping of their connectedness and ability to instigate re-tweets and mentions. If you put your Twitter details in Klout will use the same calculations to decide if you’re a Casual, Connector, Climber or Persona (with Persona’s being both connected AND influential).

5) Realmon9 – This one’s in the list on its pure potential alone. It’s still in Beta, but it’s a social media monitoring Google App. – which means, you can use it (for free) with any Google account. You can currently view a demo (you need to sign into your Google account to view it) and email to request a full account, but it looks to offer quite comprehensive listings. The developer, AJ Chen, is already working on plugging the app into Salesforce.com, to enable end-to-end CRM (the kind Radian6 and others are striving towards). One to watch!

6) Tweetreach – Not new, but still a great site for blowing away Twitter sceptics in a single click. Just add a short URL from a popular Tweet you’ve recently posted, click the button and it shows you how many people (and who) your Tweet was sent to. Great for identifying who your most valuable and viral Followers are.

7) Cligs – This short URL company offers social media monitoring in a really simple and elegant way. Paste in your long URL and it gives you a nice short version, plus an HTML version and an HTML one with a title, if you want it. In addition to the usual number of hits, Cligs gives you the times of hits, geographical location of visitors, which search engine bots have found your “clig”, Twitter and FriendFeed mentions, blog and comment links, Delicious bookmarks, plus, interestingly referral statistics – i.e. which links sent you traffic. The big problem for short URL companies is that Twitter uses bit.ly. To get around this Cligs offers apps and plugins for Gmail, iGoogle, Firefox, WordPress and TwitterFeed. It’s a first step for short URL social media monitoring – but I can see this area developing.

8) Ubervu – Ubervu’s social media comparison site lets you see how you’re ranking against your competitors in terms of social media reach and impact. It’s basically like Compete.com, but for social media. Ubervu’s main product is a freemium social media monitoring tool which is well worth a try. It’s quite powerful, but takes a bit of getting used to.

Interested in learning how to monitor social media? Tickets are on sale now for our social media monitoring master-class: Monitoring Social Media Bootcamp, 31st March 2010, London (UK)