Social Monitoring. Sorry, we do only speak English.

Juli 26th, 2010 • Social, Tools

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The other week I attended a presentation by a major social analytics vendor from the U.S. If you have ever attended a telephone presentation of one of the many social-related tools you know how shiny and well applicable these tools seem to be when they get presented to you.

During the presentation the sales representative highlighted how easy and simple it is for his tool to identify and validate social leads according to the brand’s needs. I asked how the tool does it. He pointed at the tool’s sophisticated semantical algorithms. I answered ‘Fine, so it’s only applicable in the U.S., right?’ I am German, working in a Canadian agency in the Netherlands. This tool does only speak English. It is neither prepared to cluster German, Dutch, Italian, Polish nor French conversations. He replied ‘Well, that’s the problem with any analytics tool’.

I think that’s kind of funny. Among the hundreds of social media monitoring solutions there is almost none which is polylingual. Rather simple solutions such as Viralheat or Radian 6 are able to add transparency based on keywords. But mostly every ‘semantic’ tool does fail once we are talking about all non-English places on earth. And there are countries which are not the U.S. – I am quite convinced of that.

Don’t you think it’s kind of weird that nobody talks about this challenge for marketers? I find it bizarre and strangely funny. We are talking about a hyper-globalized era. But in fact only few monitoring/analytics tools are able to speak more than one language without a strong accent.

Please contradict me if I am wrong. And please point me to the ones that do…

Tags: Analytics, Business, Monitoring, Radian 6, Semantic, Social Influence Marketing, Tools, Truth, World

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http://blog.ecairn.com Laurent Pfertzel

Hi Gerald.

I have a good friend who used to work at Yahoo. A couple of years ago, he told me one of the difficulty in search engine/content management/analysis comes from language, localisation, ….in order to achieve high level of relevance..I don't think it should be any different with monitoring tools thus what you observed.
I'm rebounding on your last sentence . I manage eCairn, we have an 'community and influencers' marketing platform which is really helping agencies/brands focus on their sweet social media spot (i.e: the 'who matters' as opposed to 'everyone'). As a matter of fact, we support many languages and have customers in France, Germany, Brazil.
I'd be happy to chat with you if you want.
Laurent
http://blog.ecairn.com Laurent Pfertzel

We do and don’t. In a nutshell, we’re a community & influencer marketing platform which means that instead of trying to scoop all mentions for a given set of keywords (and as a results, getting lots of noise) we enable marketers to focus on communities and people who matters. So they choose the slice of social media they want to focus on (it’s a bit of work, some manual). Then we pull the content for them and they can slice/dice/trend/analyze it. So we don’t really have the nightmare of indexing billions of content pieces in various languages with all the complexity that goes with it. With our approach, we support all main European language + the big asian ones.
Note that for people who want broad monitoring, we’re not well suited. We’re a solution for marketers that want to connect/engage/build relationships with the networks that’s important for them (as in social media is a network of niche networks)
If you’re interested to hear/see more, I’d be happy to show you. I love the fact that you have seen all the tools so you can also give us feedback as well as see the unique approach that we’ve chosen.
Laurent
ghensel

Umm…I know zillions of monitoring and analytics tools. The question of this article was how do they overcome the language problem? How do you do that?
http://twitter.com/patricedigi Patrice FRANCOIS

Hi,
I agree with you and I think european vendors are more often asked to deal with different languages. The Digimind platform is for example used in many different countries to analyze digital sources in all types of languages. It is possible to manage multiple languages in one single application.

Pat
michmski

Hi Gerald,
I can tell you I feel your pain – and I'm an American! There are some people that mention this challenge, but far less than I ever would have expected, as well.
I work with Synthesio, though, which is a tool you might want to check out. We monitor in 30 languages using 1° our own technology, 2° multilingual teams and locally-based analysts for reports. We can monitor in German, Dutch, Italian, Polish and French (and if you'd like we also have dashboards and can prepare reports in German or French), and can filter according to country ie Canadian sites written in French vs. French sites written in French. The sentiment is analyzed manually because there is no automatic tool yet that is up to our expectations, especially for so many languages.
Happy to be in touch : michelle @synthesio.com or on Twitter @Synthesio
ghensel

Thanks, @synthesio – I will take a look at it. So would you consider multi-language support as your core competence?
http://twitter.com/Synthesio Synthesio

Multi-language support and the fact that we don't offer just a tool, but a combined tool+service, meaning : we will put the queries into place for you and set up the dashboard, filter through the information to delete non-pertinent information, tag and analyze for sentiment, and provide full reports (unless Blast Radius would want to do this).

Michelle @Synthesio
Michaelnotte

That is indeed a key issues with many US-based tools – language limitations. If you are working in a multi-lingual context such as European one as I do, I strongly advise you to have a look at European players – there are few ones. I have been evaluating a series of social media monitoring lately and I strongly recommend to have a look at Synthesio – product is great and they are really professional.
You may also have a look at Attentio (http://www.attentio.com) – their solution is maybe not the outstanding one but it does what SMM solutions are supposed to do, it is not that expensive and they have a strong understanding of cultural/language aspects.

Cheers!
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