Most big companies today now use some kind of ‘listening platform’ to monitor market-relevant keywords and brand mentions on the social web.

Web monitoring can often yield hundreds, if not thousands, of brand-related web articles and social media posts every day.

This deals with the acute FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) issue that all companies have with the social web – “if someone is talking about our brand or business, we’d really like to know about it!”

However, web listening platforms have created a new problem. They tip more user generated content onto our screens than any normally-overworked exec can possibly wade through.

This leads to questions.

What is all that content saying about us? Who are the key people generating this material that we really need to keep an eye on? Why do we bother to collect more social web data than we can usefully analyse?

This is a problem the Dollywagon team are working hard to resolve. We’re developing content analysis algorithms that try to see the wood despite the trees.

The image below is a simple demonstration using Twitter data. Over the space of a few days we collected more than 100,000 tweets that contained the keywords , and .

The algorithms have broken this huge volume of material down into key themes, which have been automatically clustered and colour-coded. The system then provides ‘exemplar’ texts to illustrate what each theme is about.

The key insight from the image is that a simple keyword filter strategy can give rise to a wide range of content themes. In this example we have everything from ‘ethical consumerism’ to ‘lewd teenage humour’.

With this information it’s possible to quantify the ‘size’ of each theme and calculate its ‘share of discussion’. This can be a cool thing to do if you want to monitor the rise and fall of images or perceptions associated with your latest ad campaign.

You could also use this information to refine ongoing keyword strategies and avoid burning through your meagre Radian6 ration of 10,000 tweets per month. Get in touch if you’d like to know more.

Click on the image to magnify or click here download the PDF file.

Launched in January 2010, the ground-breaking ‘Radio: The Online Multiplier’ study has caused a fundamental re-evaluation of the role of radio advertising plays in driving consumers online to interact with brands.

You can download a free copy of the full report here.

The Radio Advertising Bureau (who commissioned the study) and Dollywagon (who designed and implemented it) are pleased as punch to learn this success has been officially recognised.

We’re proud to announce that ‘Radio: The Online Multiplier’ has been shortlisted for ‘Best Research Initiative’ in the prestigious Mediaweek Awards 2010. The RAB have created a YouTube video as part of their award entry that does a great job of explaining the study, which you can view below.

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