From when the story broke on 15th January up until 28th February, we pulled data from our Retail Barometer and used our Gorkana Radar tool to monitor social media conversations, to produce the below infographic, which shows mainstream and social media mentions of horsemeat.

Here are some of the key statistics we discovered:

• The horse meat scandal received over 200,000 mentions on social media and over 21,000 mentions in mainstream media.
• Tesco received the highest share of voice with (35%) of mainstream and (77%) of social media. Primark’s 7% share of voice on social media was due to a joke that was mentioned thousands of times on Twitter.
• While mainstream media discussed details of the scandal and politicians’ outrage, social media was dominated by humour, primarily in the form of Twitter jokes. Yet statistics showing a rise in sales for vegetarian brands and independent butchers indicate that some of this humour channelled genuine consumer anger at retailers’ practices.

Our Retail Barometer is a monthly report benchmarking 50 organisations from 5 retail sectors (Grocery, High Street Fashion, Online Fashion, Home & Electric and Department Stores) across mainstream and social media. The Barometer provides a monthly overview into issues affecting the retail industry and what is being said about different organisations.

The ability for clients to make or break a brand, or certainly cause damage has been greatly enhanced with the advent of social media channels. If the sector chooses to ignore the platforms where conversations occur, perhaps over concerns around compliance, then they are missing a great opportunity to improve their customer relations. If a business has no concept of what their customers are saying, then they will never have an understanding of what to change or implement, irrespective of missing an ‘iceberg’ issue that turns viral.

Monitoring the social environment keeps organisations on top of a range of topics and issues. As Benjamin Manz of assetinum.com says: “Reputational risks can best be avoided if banks are prominently present on social media channels and can react to accusations.” Again there is a pay-back for the company.

Financial service organisations are now recognising the benefits and importance of social engagement. Digital Managers are being employed and social policies created. Institutions need to know what is being said, by whom and when. This can be achieved through analysing content consistently and addressing need(s) as they arise. By connecting with customers there is a greater chance of success.

“It is important to know who you are talking to and correlate your messaging and content to that audience. The more connected customers are to the brand, the more they will use it.”
- Audrey Hendley, General Manager, New Customer Acquisition, American Express

Gorkana’s latest industry barometers, (banking, asset management, professional services), highlight the reputational benefits to financial services companies gained by listening to and engaging with social. Across these sectors the financial barometers have seen over 1.3m social posts during January-May 2012, compared with under 400,000 articles in mainstream publications for the same period.

Each month the barometers have shown increasing levels of social activity, with May peaking at circ 308,330. Perhaps to be expected is ‘banking’ where the greatest volume of social content is found. Noteworthy is ‘accountancy’ which shows the second highest volumes in social channels.

Gorkana’s Barometer results show that the financial services sector must build a presence in social media and use it to work with customers. Listening, reacting quickly and effectively across channels, nurtures trust. Analysing the content to understand the when, why and who – this is golden.

Gorkana’s development team has been working its socks off over the past few months on some exciting enhancements to make our media portal even better.

We are pleased to announce that social media content has now been integrated into the Gorkana portal enabling a complete view of all of the content that matters across print, online, broadcast and social media all in one place.

Never has it been quicker and easier for PR and marketing teams to keep an eye on the conversations and coverage that matter.  Whether it’s comparing your social media exposure against your competitors, identifying what is being said about you via the topic word cloud or understanding where your coverage is most prevalent, now it’s all available in one place.

The social media dashboard and monitoring page lets you build charts and graphs, which summarise any coverage across social media.   If you need to review this against other activity, the Cross Media Buzz Comparison chart enables you to compare mainstream and social media.

Being able to review all your activity and coverage side-by-side, makes the job of identifying connections between your social media and mainstream coverage painless.

To find out more and watch a demonstration video click here.

Want to be one of the first to try the new and improved Gorkana Media portal?  Just email jason.weekes@gorkana.com or call +44 20 7674 0347.

Following the recent eviction of protestors from the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral, the future of the Occupy London movement has been hanging in the balance. What next for demonstrators? Has the six-month stand-off made any long-term impact at all? Will we ever see those V for Vendetta masks again?

Despite the many unanswered questions, one thing we know for certain is that with the weather-beaten tents now packed away, social media is likely to prove a key battleground for the next wave of action.  Yes, there’s more to come. Activists have already promised on the Occupy LSX website that “this is only the beginning”, “with all to be revealed in time”.

Since October, I’ve been using a nifty tool called Metrica Radar to track social media activity around the Occupy London movement. Over the past four-and-a-half months,  it’s picked up over 162,000 mentions of ‘Occupy London’ and ‘Occupy LSX’ alone.  Diving into the data offers some interesting perspectives on how this groundswell of activism has played out in the online consciousness.

Here are some of my Occupy London social media takeaways:

1) Occupy Twitter

Twitter continues to be the preferred platform for online activism, with  around 72% of mentions coming from the micro-blogging site. Remember the #arabspring? The 2009/2010 uprising in Iran has since been dubbed the “Twitter revolution”.

Other than @OccupyLondon and @OccupyLSX, which generated more than 4,000 tweets between them, political tweeters – including  @fatcouncillor, @jdpoc and @MockTheLeft - were the most prolific voices.  Naturally not all were supportive of the movement’s radical roots. For example, the mysterious @fatcouncillor (844 tweets), who claims to be “neither fat, nor a councillor”, who had this to say:  And no political protest would be complete without some celebrity’s two-cents’ worth. Comedian Russell Brand (@rustyrockets), who has 3.8 million followers, was one of the most prominent tweeters on the issue. His thoughts were a little more complimentary:

So Twitter more than played its part, but does a pithy 140-character statement necessarily constitute real participation? The jury’s still out on this one, but for some great food for thought read Malcolm Gladwell’s piece in the New Yorker that sets out the arguments for and against online activism. Among several points he makes is that social media is built around “weak ties” which “seldom lead to high-risk activism”.  Will future events might prove him wrong? Watch this space.

2) A long-running campaign is difficult to sustain

Like any campaign, public interest in the Occupy movement was driven by big, media-friendly stories. Social media buzz peaked around key events such as Julian Assange’s visit to the campsite in October, protestors’ ‘storming’ of the UBS building in November and the secret Radiohead gig held in support of the cause in December. The latest (and most prominent) peak on the chart below – which also  breaks volumes down by Metrica Radar’s automated sentiment - was on eviction day on February 27th.

But the noise level wasn’t always sky-high.  Interest waned during the bitter winter months of January and early February.  During these lull periods, the number of mentions hovered around the two-hundred mark per day and were often scattered in focus.

Occupy activist Naomi Colvin echoed this in a recent interview with The Guardian. She said: “I think we managed to keep the headlines coming rather efficiently for the first two and a half months – and there was a nice fillip at the beginning of the year… I would say that practical issues – keeping multiple sites going, activist burnout, resources – made that more difficult after a while. The challenge for next time around is to harness that energy and be more realistic about how long it can be sustained for.”

Movements.org has a great article on ‘How to Spark and Build a Social Movement’.  It says: “When defining the timeline of your campaign, keep in mind that it will be made of peaks, small successes where you reach short-term goals, and valleys, lulls or small failures. After each you will have to regroup, reevaluate your resources, your audiences and your tactics, and then move forward.”  In short, a long-running campaign should comprise many mini ones, each with its own strategy and focus.

3) The rise of non-traditional sources of information

Alternative news sites identifed strongly with the Occupy movement and its anti-establishment agenda.  Among the top news sites to cover Occupy-related stories were ReporterTV (354 mentions), London-Informer.com (248 mentions) and Demotix.com (497 mentions). The Wall Street Journal, in comparison, generated just 140 mentions.

I’m a fan of Demotix in particular – a citizen journalism website which operates on a new model of journalism that many observers are touting as the way forward.  Launched in 2009, it shares user-generated content from a pool of freelance journalists and photographs in a bid to reduce our independence on traditional media.

The growing dominance of alternative news sites in this instance is emblematic of a growing scepticism towards mainstream media sources, and in the impending struggle between the two, I’d say the smart money’s on the former. Definitely a trend to keep an eye on.

For more information on using Metrica Radar to track social media activity in governmental and not-for-profit sector, e-mail govandngo@btsdev2.co.uk/gorkana/metrica 

Sun rises at Dawn in New Hampshire, October 24th 2011

As many of you will know, Metrica has been helping our clients manage and measure social media since the mid 2000s – 2005 specifically when we were working with Dell during the infamous Jeff Jarvis / Dell Hell crisis.  We have watched as social media has changed from being an oft-derided form of content, commonly slated as just the ramblings of people with no friends publicising their diaries online, through to a communication channel that is revolutionising the media and marketing industries.  Indeed, revolutionising business itself.

During this time many new companies have come to the market offering social media monitoring, social media planning, and social media measurement services.  Most of these companies are basically software houses building platforms based on a one sized fits all approach that attempt to be all things to all people.  They try to capture all social media conversations and bring meaning to them with basic analytics.  These companies have been attempting to reinvent the measurement wheel and trying to come up with indices and scoring systems to interpret engagement, tone and influence for example. They all lack tailored measurement built around client organisations ‘ actual objectives of course. So it’s no wonder that so many clients are confused by social media, scared of entering the arena, bewildered by how to monitor it, and bamboozled by how to measure it.

Avoiding social media measurement confusion

Earlier this year, I was asked by AMEC, the International Association for the Measurement and Evaluation of Communication, to chair a group to look into how we could help the PR industry see through the confusion and establish some social media measurement standards.

I formed a group of some of the world’s best and most experienced experts in the sector and have agreed with them all some of the areas that we need to address.  These include standards on measuring influence, sentiment, and engagement. Additionally, we want clients to have transparency into what monitoring and content they are getting from their suppliers, and for their suppliers to be consistent with such simple things as what is a unit of content, and the definitions of terms used in social media.

AMEC recognises that it doesn’t have all of the answers itself so we are broadening out the quest by hosting a half day summit in London on Thursday 17th November entitled ‘The Big Ask.’ At the event we will be asking client organisations (speakers from which include PWC and Microsoft) to tell us what are the areas that they are finding most challenging. We want to broaden this out further too however.

Beyond the Barcelona Principles – moving towards the PR Measurement Agenda 2020

AMEC knows it can’t set standards alone.  We have a proud record of working collaboratively with other parties including establishing the 7  Barcelona Principles – one of which famously denounced the dreaded AVE as a non-valid metric.   AMEC’s social media measurement group has decided to take this approach again. We have formed a coalition with the IPR and the CPRF to work on new standards together.

Social media is not just about public relations

Social media has blurred the lines between many marketing disciplines and what has become clear is that there are a number of bodies working on setting social media standards in different silos.  So that is what brings us to New Hampshire. I’m here at the invitation of  Katie Paine to meet with many of these interested parties at the Social Media Measurement Standards Conclave.  The group meeting tomorrow includes:

• AMEC (The International Association for the Measurement and Evaluation of Communication) Rep: Richard Bagnall
• WOMMA (Word of Mouth Marketing Association) Rep: Brad Fay
• WAA (Web Analytics Association) Rep: John Lovett
• SNCR (Society for New Communications Research) Rep: Jennifer McClure
• IPR (The Institute for Public Relations) Rep: Frank Ovaitt 
• CPRF (Council for Public Relations Firms) Rep: Tim Marklein
• IABC (International Association of Business Communicators) Rep: Paige Wesley
• PRSA (Public Relations Society of America) Rep:  Professor Don Wright
• CIPR (Chartered Institute of Public Relations) Rep: Phillip Sheldrake

as well as representatives from Proctor & Gamble and Dell.
Our goals will be to:

1. eliminate confusion in the market place about social media measurement standards
2. gain consensus arounda definition for social media measurement standards
3. document all efforts that are underway to establish standards for social media measurement
4. reduce duplicative & redundant efforts around setting social media measurement standards

Tomorrow’s event, the social media measurement standards conclave, has its own twitter hashtag #smmsc which will allow you to follow along.  We would love to hear your thoughts and feedback on what areas of social media monitoring and measurement you find most confusing and would benefit from clear standards being in place.
Finally, if you can make it to London, it’s not too late to book a place at the ‘Big Ask’ conference.  Details are all available online. We hope to see you there!