Filed under: social media
YouTube has been growing and maturing as a platform for distributing content generated by users and companies alike.
In a recent blog post, Storyful editor and TED speaker Markham Nolan says that YouTube is ”becoming the most important repository of documentary evidence about humankind in existence.”
What makes YouTube so important, and why it it important to monitor it?
It’s a valuable primary source
YouTube is a source of original, unedited videos of events and presentations that aren’t available elsewhere. Media will edit, spin, label, and otherwise attempt to color the raw material.
As Markham Nolan says:
I wanted to watch the [Democratic National Convention] unadulterated, without commentary, without the partisan hackery or faux-objectivity of the networks. YouTube had a page dedicated to the conventions, where I could browse in and out of the live action as it happened, or, when things became a little dull, review videos from speeches I had missed.
Your niche industry is covered
Broadcast media, such as cable news or radio, have a set number of channels or frequencies and can only dedicate limited time to any single event. YouTube, on the other hand, has no such limits. No matter how small a subject is, it can be covered in great depth.
Nolan remarks on the recent Red Bull stunt:
Felix Baumgartner’s edge-of-the-atmosphere parachute jump was the second. Eight million people logged on to watch that little hop live via YouTube. News channels couldn’t devote the adequate time to it and would skip in and out, but Red Bull’s YouTube channel streamed the entire thing.
Get deep coverage
To paraphrase David Bowie, with YouTube we can be journalists, if just for one day. Gain access to raw information not available to journalists or that are too small to have covered in detail.
Nolan gives the Arab Spring as an example of this:
We are now the most chronicled generation in history. There has never been a greater level of unfiltered documentation of humanity (caveats coming) in history. It also gives us a window into countries that old-school news would never have shown.Through YouTube you get to see past media stereotypes to get candid glimpses from Saudi Arabia, central Russia, caucus states, Pacific islands and elsewhere.
What does this mean for you?
There is an ever increasing amount of content to monitor and analyze and YouTube is a space where this is occurring. Your tools should be keeping up with the pace and helping you sift through this potentially overwhelming information.
Although traditional broadcast, print, and online media are still dominant and where most people go to get their news, YouTube is growing. It’s more important than just rounding out your monitoring and competitive analysis. It’s indispensable.
See a TED Talk by Markham Nolan TED Talk here:
(Hat tip to Kate Torovnick at the TED Blog)
January 24, 2013
Today’s blog post was inspired by a recent conversation between some Moreover employees. My hope is that this post will give you some insight into who we are as a company and why we do what we do.
Numbers Do Lie (or Can Mislead)
Moreover is strong in the Media Monitoring field — our online news coverage is second to none. But why do some other media monitoring brands tout vast numbers of social media sites, compared to our more humble-sounding index?
The answer lies in what information our customers are trying to glean from their research. There is a considerable amount of noise that becomes a distraction (information overload). Effective monitoring of impactful sources is the driving force behind our efforts to grow and maintain pertinent coverage of social media.
Quantity of Data vs. Quality of Understanding
Just like any media monitoring company, we have competing goals. We want more coverage and more data, while keeping the tools that our clients use lightning fast and giving them only the data that helps them solve their needs.
That “only” is important.
Beware the Big
Moreover owns the ping server Weblogs.com. We have access to data of millions and millions of blogs posting content daily. We know where to look if we’d ever want to inflate our numbers, but we won’t.
Instead, we choose a “White List” approach, in which sources are vetted before they make it into our clients’ search results. When our Newsdesk clients run their searches, the data they want is more likely to be at their fingertips, rather than scattered amongst poor quality data.
More data is better only so long as it can be seen and used. Adding more content to sift through can make finding usable content more difficult. Having too much data can be worse than too little when it hinders the discovery of relevant content.
Drawbacks and Trade-offs
Of course the White List approach has its own issues. An important blog may not be covered when it’s needed. And, it makes it harder to track all mentions of keywords across all social media.
To mitigate this, Moreover’s Client Services and Editorial teams work with our clients to add the blogs and other social media that are important to them. This customer-focused coverage expansion process ensures that we provide broad coverage across multiple industries and niches. We also look at our own data for mentions of new sites, while seeking out other high-value sources of data.
A brief note on “full coverage”: With countless blogs being created and abandoned daily, it’s unlikely that anyone has full coverage. It is more accurate to say “less incomplete coverage”.
Pride in our Numbers
Moreover is proud of our 3.5 million social media feeds and our 55,000 online News sources. The number that makes us most proud, though, is our 90%+ customer retention rate. That number clearly shows we are on the right path. And we’ll continue to grow our source list in ways that bring customers value and help them find the data they need to solve their unique problems.
If you’re a Moreover customer and there are sources that are relevant to your needs that Moreover does not monitor, let us know. Our Client Services team will be happy to work with you to get these into our coverage.
November 14, 2012
In addition to the newly available TV and radio data. Moreover is now monitoring millions more forums and message boards. Together with online news, PDFs of hard-copy articles, blogs, Twitter, Q&A sites, Facebook pages and more, this allows for a 360 degree view of the news and social media landscape.
Click here to read more about our new coverage of forums.
January 26, 2012
Helen Goss of Boyes Turner offers some great advice on how to navigate the murky intersection of work and social media.
As social media marketing and usage increases the definitions of the law in regards to social media abuse will increase and become harsher. In many ways it is the same as in ‘real life’ working arrangements. You cannot simply go around ‘slagging off’ your boss or your company and expect not to be taken to task over it.
Social Media is not to be used for abuse or airing difference. It’s dangerous to both parties.
Bottom line- don’t put things into print about someone that you would not want them reading.
Helen walks through some specific cases of employees and employers using and abusing social media and the resulting court rulings. Definitely worth the read.
Let us know what you think about this in the comments. When should an employee be answerable to their company for their personal posts and tweets?
September 12, 2011
Google+ is the talk of the town in the Social Media world right now, and it seems to have caught the blogosphere and traditional news world largely unawares with its launch on June 28th:
Casey Henry over at the SEOMoz daily blog has a good overview of its features. While the article is well-worth the read, the comments are excellent. The commenters are almost entirely professionals that make their living largely on Social Media and they weigh in about their initial reactions and concerns.
Some highlights:
On Google+ being complicated and the “mom test”:
Casey Henry:
I try to judge anything new that comes out with my parents in mind. If they won’t understand it or use it, then the product has a tough road ahead of it. I have a had time believe that many Facebook users will be switching to Google+ anytime soon. I also don’t like the idea of trying to maintian [sic] two social networks with my information, let alone playing on Twitter too.
practicalseo’s response:
Everything has a learning curve, i don’t see that as a down side… If it didn’t have a learning curve it would be a copy of something else, and where would that place Google? I had fun with Google+ for a few hours, still getting the hand of it, but so far I like it, it feels clean, no distractions like FB… to me Fb feels too overcrowded, I mean in SEO we teach our clients that their pages should be to the point, Google+ reminds me more of that.
Bridging the great divide:
Clif Haley
All we need now is for someone to create a Chrome extension that allows you to auto-post to your Facebook profile from your Google+ profile, and stream your Facebook news to your Google+ stream…
Comparisons to failed Google products:
seo-himanshu
I will be surprised if it doesn’t end up like Google wave.
Read them all here.
Have you gotten in? What do you think?
July 7, 2011
Ideya Ltd. has published a sweeping 487 page report on available Social Media Monitoring tools, of which Moreover Technologies’ Award winning Newsdesk 4 has a review.
Check it out!
June 30, 2011
A story about a Florida bank being foreclosed on by a homeowner has recently gone viral. Noah Seidenberg of The Evanstonian has a good summary of this crazy turn of events:
So here’s what happened. A couple in Naples, Florida bought a home with cash (no mortgage) in 2009. In 2010, Bank of America began foreclosure proceedings against them. This was Bank of America’s mistake, of course. This couple, the Nyerges, hired an attorney to help defend them against this foreclosure, and then Bank of America realized their mistake and dropped it. Well, it’s great that it’s been dropped, but the Nyerges are out $2,534 in legal fees. So they’ve requested that Bank of America cover the cost multiple times over the phone and in writing. They finally get a judge to order that Bank of America pay the fees. When they still haven’t gotten their check after five months of more calls and letters, they obtained an order of foreclosure against the bank.
Read the whole thing here.
While this has been reported in the news, Social Media has really run wild with the story. Using Newsdesk 4, I plotted out the mention of Bank of America and foreclosures (in their various permutations). You can see the huge spike of blog posts vs traditional news coverage.
For the last 30 days, Social Media and News coverage have been trending together rather evenly. For this story, however, blogs blew the news sites out of the water.
A lot of people are chasing after the nature of what makes a story viral. In this case it seems rather clear that the populist angle in this story is appealing. It is human nature to celebrate the little guy winning over the big guy.
Do you agree? Let us know in the comments.
June 8, 2011
Advanced semantic tagging helps find crucial intel faster, providing a competitive edge.
Companies are drowning in data. Yet, insightful information is key to smarter decision-making and competitive edge. Finding the “sweet spot” between information overload and relevant intel is one of the hottest topics in today’s data-driven decision-making realm.
Global media aggregation and monitoring company Moreover Technologies is moving aggressively to meet data-driven market needs—including use of advanced semantic tagging. Recently, Moreover inked a multi-year contract that extends use of Thomson Reuters’ OpenCalais semantic tagging processes to social media. ”Companies are demanding fast, reliable content results, especially elusive posts that are only five or six words long. They don’t have the time or patience to sift through tons of irrelevant content in hopes of finding something meaningful,” says Paul Farrell, Moreover Technologies President. ”OpenCalais links content with entities such as people, places, and organizations, facts such as people working for specified companies, and events like appointments to a new position.”
May 20, 2011
Posted by Chad
Anyone can make their very own clone of Twitter, but not everyone has what it takes to confront the Social Media giant head-on. UberMedia, owner of UberSocial and Twidroyd, may be looking to do just that:
According to CNN, UberMedia — the company responsible for UberSocial, Echofon and Twidroyd — is looking into developing its own Twitter-like competitor. CNN cites three people briefed on the matter (but not authorized to speak publicly) as describing the service as a response to some of the most common complaints about Twitter, including restrictions on message length. Read the full post here.
Will anyone people able to displace Twitter from its top spot in the microblogging world?
In other Twitter news: Former CEO says original co-founder didn’t get enough credit
April 14, 2011
Posted by Chad
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.
April 5, 2011
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