After seeing the popularity of social media dashboards, most of you would be thinking about creating a dashboard for your own topic. Here’s a 2 minute guide for creating a public social media dashboard.

- Sign Up to ContextMine
- Verify your account from your mail
- Login to Context Mine
- Create Search Criteria / Enter Keyword

- Submit to Begin Monitoring - You will find this option activated once you will save your search criteria. After submitting your search criteria it will be disabled again.

- Create public URL – Click on Update Profile at top right corner. Go to User Preferences. Set your options and click on update. You’ll get your own public URL.

The entire process will not take more than 2 minutes. Go ahead and create your own dashboard.

Wael Ghonim, a marketing manager for Google, played a key role in organizing the January 25 protest by reaching out to Egyptian youths on Facebook. Ghonim was arrested in Cairo and imprisoned for 12 days. After his release he talked to CNN and he said social media was responsible for Egyptian uprising. He thanked Facebook for the same. Here is an excerpt from his interview

“I want to meet Mark Zuckerberg one day and thank him. I’m talking on behalf of Egypt. This revolution started online. This revolution started on Facebook. This revolution started in June 2010 when hundreds of thousands of Egyptians started collaborating content. We would post a video on Facebook that would be shared by 60,000 people on their walls within a few hours. I’ve always said that if you want to liberate a society just give them the Internet.”

Yes, this is the power of Internet. And, social media as a new tool on internet is getting maximum momentum to collaborate and show the power of masses. It’s not just applicable to brands and products but even politics are run on social media.

Social Media Election

Election is like a war. It is fought on ground, locally, internationally; in person, on the news and now also on social media. Barack Obama’s presidential bid in 2008 is one of such examples. The recently held British General Election is termed as the first social media election. Check out this article which talks about “first British general election in the social media age – what difference has it made?” The article narrates

“This is the one campaign where it might have a specific role, where we can concentrate on it specifically. Next time it will just be part of every political correspondent’s job. By the next election, social media will be woven into our daily lives – and probably we’ll have not just general polls, but indicators of how our constituencies’ mood is changing. Are we ready for that? We may have to be.”

Role of ContextMine

As we see the radical impact we know that social media strategy is going to be one of the key strategies for any political campaign. To derive that strategy, execute that and monitor that would require a tool which can deal with huge amount of contextual data added with customized business intelligence solutions. ContextMine fits to that requirement.

• Listen – The first and foremost strategy on social media could be to listen, listen the buzz it is creating, listen the trend it is setting and listen the way it is moving. Unless you get the messages and understand views you can’t develop a good strategy to utilize it. ContextMine helps to filter out social media messages based on your need. You can create a context and the tool will take care of filtering the millions of messages floating on hundreds of different channels.
• Engage – Once you have the relevant messages and details of people who are generating those messages, you would like to engage them. ContextMine helps in engaging content generators. It helps to identify active people and influential people. The strategy to engage them could be different. You may like to target most influential people first as they are the people who are influencing others to join forces. They are the opinion leaders of the society. The collaborative environment provide by ContextMine is the best dashboard to engage your opinion leaders and others who are creating the buzz.
• Optimize – Social Media is a collection of many different platforms and correcting one will not cover the entire media. You have to listen all of them. You have to engage people at every corner and you will have to optimize your resources to quickly glance into all the major channels and all the major updates. One of the major USPs of ContextMine is to provide you a bird’s eye view on top messages from almost all popular channels. You can quickly glance through them and if needed act on them in real-time.

Social Media is not changing the way democracy functions, not as of yet. But, it is surely changing the way people collaborate to take major decisions. Egypt is just one success story, there are many more to come. ContextMine as a product will help you to optimize your efforts and see the stories folding in real-time.

We are happy to announce three new features we added in Context Mine, today:

• Easy topic profile setup, to help simplify topic creation process
• Application Source Analysis, which displays statistics for applications & devices used by your users for posting messages
• Integration with Microsoft Ad Center, to provide real time Ad bidding information on Bing and Microsoft display networks for your keywords & phrases

We appreciate the feedback we keep on getting from our customers. This helps make sure that our product road map is always aligned with our customer needs and we keep on releasing new features and updates that add value for our user base.

Easy Topic Profile Setup:

Majority of the current users are excited about the power & flexibility offered by our topic creation wizard. Unlike most other social media monitoring tools in the market today, it not only lets you create topics by keywords, it also allows you to create topic by URLs & or even public/private social media profiles.  However, the topic creation process was not entirely smooth & user friendly. With the release of new & improved topic wizard, we hope that we have addressed those concerns.

How to use this feature:

When your log-in to your account for the first time after profile activation, you will be prompted with this wizard automatically.  You can also navigate to this wizard by selecting ‘Add Topic’ option from the brand hierarchy screen.

On the above screen, Keyword topic option is presented as a default option, but you can click on other option icons (displayed at the bottom) to change your topic type.  Our topic profile setup wizard will present series of simple steps to let you create topic, preview your results and allow you to make your search persistent.

You can also make use of ‘Advanced Query’ option to construct more powerful queries using Boolean operators like AND/OR/NOT.

Application Source Analysis:

We have added one more statistics from Twitter & Facebook messages: Application Source Analysis.  This will allow you to view statistics around applications that are being used to tweet or send Facebook updates.  It initially displays breakdown by device type (PC v/s smartphones & tablets)

You can drill it down further to view breakdown by each category. Additionally, smartphones category will also display comparison between four major mobile OS: iOS, Android, Blackberry and Microsoft. You can also click on any of the source link URLs (on left side) to view messages posted via that source.

Microsoft Ad Center Integration:

As some of you already know, ContextMine has integrations with Google Ad Words to view Ad bidding information for Google in real time .  We have expanded capabilities of our Ad Networks tab by adding Microsoft Ad Center into the mix as well.  It will allow you to monitor Ad bidding information from Microsoft in real time. Our Ad Networks tab will let you compare CPC , expected no of clicks & ad position for your keywords and phrases between Google & Microsoft You can update your bidding information, add keywords/phrases and most importantly, compare search insight v/s social media insights  for your keywords side by side.  To access this feature, simply navigate to ‘Ad Networks’ tab.

Please note that, similar to Google Ad Words, this feature is available to our premium customers only.  To learn more about this feature, send us an email with your ContextMine account information at sales@context.com.

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We hope that you find these features useful.   As always, please share with us any feedback, questions or concerns you may have regarding our product.

Superbowl is traditionally ranked the biggest day of TV for advertisers. Three million dollars for 30 seconds of spot may sound like an exorbitant amount of money, but it provides an avenue to reach an audience of over 100 million viewers. There were lots of varieties & themes in these year’s advertisements. So which ones clicked with the audience and which ones missed?

Over the superbowl week-end, we used Context Mine to gauge social media reaction to various commercials that were aired during & before the game.  We started measuring various commercials few days before it were aired to record pre-buzz of some of those campaigns. Our pre game buzz analysis includes recording twitter sentiment for those commercials from Friday, 2/2/2010 onwards till about 2:00pm EST when the superbowl pregame shows began airing.  Our post game buzz analysis records sentiment from 2:00pm EST on game day till about 2:00pm EST the following day.

In terms of pre game buzz, Motorola, Groupon, Volkswagen, Doritos, and Audi had some of the most discussed commercials on twitter.  And those commercials continued to generate lot of post game buzz as well. During and after the game, Groupon was leading the way in terms of overall number of conversations, but as I had highlighted in my previous post here, plenty of it was negative. Chrysler’s Eminem/Detroit commercial which had scant pre game buzz was also one of the most talked about ads on twitter-verse during and after the game.

While veterans of super bowl commercials like Budweiser, Pepsi, Go Daddy continued to fill out the top-buzzed list, couple of new comers like Best Buy, Bridgestone managed to grab plenty of attention as well. Here is our list:

I think there are still questions as to whether superbowl buzz is going to translate into increase in sales and revenues for those advertisers. It will also be interesting to watch whether negative buzz surrounding Groupon’s commercial is going to have much impact in long term.  Superbowl XLV is over. But for companies and their advertisers, social media monitoring efforts to gain insights into customer conversation,  and in turn responding to their concerns and complaints does not end with superbowl.

Superbowl Ad results are in and one of the most talked about superbowl commercial was by Groupon. Social media reaction to their ad has been fast and furious. So far there have been over 9000 tweets in last 24 hr and judging by following conversation summary of those tweets, most reaction has been negative.  Phrases and hashtags like controversial, offensive, outrage, tasteless, adfail  has thoroughly dominated conversation around Groupon’s superbowl commercial: