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Transparency and track record are extremely important criteria for selecting and staying with a social media monitoring and aggregation company. Anyone can make any claims about anything at any time, but how do they document them?

It’s a very slippery slope, as social media monitoring aggregator’s work 24/7 to find and promote their latest competitive edge. As everyone knows, the more you’re scrambling for the top spot, the greater the likelihood of exaggerated or downright false claims.

That said, there are three “Qs” that will help define the best social media monitoring solution  partner for you. They are: Quantity, Quality, Questioning.

Quantity & Quality

This is much trickier than it seems at first glance. For example, Moreover Technologies, just achieved a milestone of actively monitoring 2.5 million-plus independent social media feeds. That’s more than triple the 750,000 active feeds just a year ago, and positions Moreover Technologies as a strong force in the social media monitoring space.

But quantity without quality means nothing. You can have the highest quantity in the world, but if a substantial portion of the feeds are spam, dead blogs and adult blogs, you’re working at cross-purposes. It makes it that much harder to find real-time relevant information.

So, while we are adding to the total feed base, we’re also deleting material that doesn’t meet our spam-free White List standards. In fact, we just eliminated 125,000 feeds that had not posted in the last six months or were not posting original content.

Questioning.

Don’t take our claims or anyone else’s at face value. This is where transparency and track record become very important. A legitimate claim should be factually provable via some type of transparent data. For example, we can document our total number of feeds, and show you the ones that we’ve taken off the White List.

Track record brings historical performance data into view. If a company has a long history of providing accurate and verifiable information, it enhances the likelihood of a continuing tradition. On the other hand, if a company hasn’t been around long enough to have amassed a substantial track record, or has been called out for providing inflated data, it’s more likely to continue this process. After all, habits—both good and bad—are hard to break.

By seeking to understand quantity and quality of the social media monitoring data provided, then asking lots of questions to verify legitimacy and long-term consistency, you will get a social media monitoring solution that will perform today, tomorrow, and long beyond.

Moreover developed the new Search functionality at the request of our clients, to expand on the search options we provide across our Source Lists.  This option enables our clients to submit Source Lists to determine whether Moreover is already harvesting specific sites in the News Metabase and/or Social Media Metabase.

The tool provides either exact or partial matches.  Where a link is not matched precisely, but the domain is part of our index, this will appear as a partial result.

All results returned provide the relevant source information and metadata as found in the other tabs within the Metabase Portal by clicking the grey button next to each result.  The Feed Class column defines whether the matched entry is part of the News Metabase or Social Media Metabase.

We hope this additional functionality will really show off our sources lists and let us know should you have any questions or feedback!

The portal is updated daily and provides detailed information of Moreover’s coverage of the social Web, including source lists and numbers of posts over time. Customers can then use a number of filters and criteria to create custom lists and drill down even deeper. This complete insight into Moreover’s continually expanding social media universe provides customers with detailed, complementary information to help manage, prioritize and communicate all the media covered by the Metabase service.

The portal allows for fully configurable source lists to search and browse sources, or mix-and-match filters and feed classes to drill down and view custom sets of feeds to see exactly what is covered by publishing platform, rank, country, language, and more. It is also possible to view and contrast the share of feeds and posts with the Social Media Metabase by various criteria:

Feed and post stats over time display data for the past 30 days, including average posts per day and per feed:

Drilling down deeper still customers can select additional filters to query the data by, and view detailed statistics for the last 30 days. Over time, we will be adding more features to this portal, including News Metabase coverage, API documentation, and customer service options.

Should you be interested in learning more about any Moreover product then please fill out our free trial request form here.

Over the past few months we have been particularly busy growing our coverage of news and social media sources, with much more still to come in the New Year. The UGC Metabase now serves around 750k posts a day from our spam-free White List of social media sites. This represents a 200% increase in volume from earlier in the year, and coverage has now jumped to 435k feeds watched with a further increase due by year-end. Coverage has particularly been boosted over platforms like Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and Wikipedia to deliver a rich and diverse range of social media sources now being watched, along with other microblogging platforms, consumer reviews, forums, Q&A sites and more. We have also increased the number of social media feeds with geotagging, so users can now easily list and organise sources by nationality and region.

On the News Metabase side of things we now index over half a million news articles a day from 32k sources, a twenty percent increase in recent months. Other improvements to the news side include enhancing the way we identify and tag article authors and recently growing the number of news categories available to 800. The full complement of news feeds can be seen here : http://w.moreover.com/public/free-rss/prebuilt-feeds.html

We’d love to hear any queries or reactions to these changes, so feel free to drop us a line below!

And we’re adding a new date field, showing the time we indexed a particular post. This is in addition to the publish date already provided, as copied from the original XML/RSS feed.

1. Improved language detection at post level 

Blog feeds normally state which language they are in. However, this isn’t always reliable – typically blog publishing platforms have a default language setting, and bloggers do not always update their blogs to give their local language. The result is a significant portion of blog feeds with the wrong language. 

We’ve been working hard in the background to produce a more reliable approach to language detection. We’ll be rolling this out next month as the basis for setting the post’s language, as provided in the <language> tag. Only when this approach is unable to confidently determine the language, will we revert to using the language tag provided in the original XML as fallback.

2. New language tagging at feed level

 Further to this, we are adding a new <feedLanguage> tag, showing the language of the blog feed. This is in addition to the existing <language> tag referred to above, which is at post level. 

Adding language categorisation at feed level makes it possible to better organise the index by language – for example we can identify exactly which blogs are in French, which are in English, etc, and provide and manage these in lists.

The new language tag will appear in the UGC XML as follows

<feedLink>http://blog.moreover.com/feed/</feedLink> 
<feedLanguage>English</feedLanguage>
<generator>http://wordpress.org/?v=MU</generator>

3. Introducing a new Harvest Date field

Lastly, we’re adding a new <itemHarvestDate> field to the feed. This gives the time Moreover actually indexed the item. We already pass on the publish date of the post, as provided in the original XML/RSS feed — The new index time complements this tag and can provide, for example, additional information about the latency of indexing as it occurs across the feeds.

The new harvest date tag will appear in the UGC XML as follows:

<pubDate>2009-02-11 14:26:06.0</pubDate>
<itemHarvestDate>2009-03-13 18:38:21.0</itemHarvestDate>
<validDate>2009-03-13 18:37:18.0</validDate>

All times are shown in GMT.

We believe in being open and transparent about our crawling performance, and are confident about our technology. We invite comparison with other, similar services (for example, see Technorati and a recent comment on ReadWriteWeb), and welcome any feedback you, as customers and users, have.

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