Welcome to the fourth week of our Political Buzz post in association with Brandwatch, and the last one before the election. What an exiting week it has been, first with the #bigotgate scandal of Gordon Brown leaving his mic on and then with the final #leadersdebate on yesterday evening. A lot of things for people to talk about, but how has it been affecting the buzz online?

We can see a huge increase in conversation volume for all 3 leaders with David Cameron and Nick Clegg roughly doubling their mentions. Gordon Brown however sees the biggest rise, almost tripling his number of mentions. Is this however a positive thing? If we take a look at the volume of mentions by day, we see a big spike on the 28th and 29th of April.

This is around the time that Gordon was in Rochdale, speaking to Mrs Duffy, so I think we can assume that not all the conversation was positive. See more about the radio mic incident here or play the bonus level in Downing Street Fighter.

Where people are talking most about the 3 leaders doesn’t appear to have changed a great deal at the top, where only Youtube and Facebook appear to have “swapped” places. However down at the bottom it is a different story.

4 new kids on the block in the form of Reuters, Yahoo News, New Statesman and Mashget. Interestingly all are news providers, and three of them are digital news sources. The ones they knocked off the top 20 are the Daily Express, BBC, Channel 4 and Telegraph blogs, all “traditional” news providers. Interesting take on conversation occurring around new media and news aggregators? Perhaps, but that’s another story.

Perhaps more interestingly is what is just below the top 20, with Cosmopolitan forums, the Student Room and This is London all getting into the top 30 showing that other Social Networks are starting to talk about the election more and more.

Talk on Twitter has been overwhelmingly about Brown’s radio mic hiccup.

And the third leaders debate:

But according to some none of this Social Media stuff even matters. This article by Gordon MacMillan from The Wall suggests that Twitter and Facebook are unrepresentative. While this may be true, I think it is unwise to rule out the enormous impact Social Media has had over the past few weeks, even if the sentiment scores don’t marry up to the polls.

Finally one of our favourite comments from the leaders debate from @DavidSchneider:

And another from a @willself to put the whole #bigotgate business in a little perspective:

Come back next week and see what has happened in the final week of the run up to the election, and find out who is our new glorious leader.

Hopefully you know what kind of communities you are looking for and the language your audience use, but how do you use this to best find the communities you want? Well there are plenty of tools out there and here are some of the most commonly used tools here in the Qube office.

Google search

Obviously Google is a good place to start! Typing in the kind of community you are looking for will get you some results but check out the filter options for a more refined search (see below). You can then see just results from forums or blogs and change how recently they were updated. This is always my first port of call and its flexibility should cover a large amount of your communities, especially those that fall outside the big social networking sites.

Twitter search

Searching Twitter is a great place to find up to the minute thoughts and feelings on a topic. Twitter has two ways of searching, Twitter search and Find People. Find people will get you names based around the terms you have searched for but the real power of Twitter is its search tool which will find everyone that has mentioned your term in the last fortnight. Remember you can refine your results with the advanced search options like below. Twitter is a great way for finding influencers around your target audience.

Facebook search

Facebook has had a recent overhaul to allow more Twitter like search results. You can filter your results into people, pages, groups and updates. Make sure you look across a range of these to find the best communities and influencers.

Social Seek

A desktop app that will search across a variety of popular social networks and blogs and pull in the results. The nice thing about this app is it will also give you charts and visualisations as well as allowing you to export the data, this can be really useful when trying to analyse a community or term.

Brandwatch

The only paid for service on this list but if you want continued and extensive community finding it is a great tool. Especially recommended for high end users just make sure you have a clear set of defined terms you want to find communities around.

Tools are just the start of any community mapping and they still require a high level of care and attention. The communities you find will only be as good as the words you put in so make sure you thoroughly semantically map your audience. A combination of these tools should get you to the majority of places your audience is talking but just incase you want to try a few more tools to really maximise your coverage here a few more: IceRocket, BlogPulse, Omgili, Delicious and Blinkx.

Let me know if you have any other preferred tools or why you use these tools in the comments

The growing sophistication of buzz monitoring tools is leading many to suggest we don’t need traditional research analysis skills.

Tools such as Brandwatch and  Scoutlabs can gather huge amounts of data so you can keep up with what your customers are saying online – not just about you but about your competitors. It’s a fundamental part of modern day business.

They search across a huge range of communities and websites to pull out information relevant to your brand. This makes them perfect for collecting huge amounts of data that would take forever to do manually.

Machines don’t think like people

What they can’t do is tell you what it all means for your business. Buzz tools still require people, because analysis is a job for people. Machines can’t think like us yet and until they can, the technological part of buzz monitoring is just part of the mix. And this is where many companies get it wrong.

Tools can offer a variety of ways to track buzz, such as sentiment analysis, but they can’t interpret things like a human being. They can’t understand sarcasm and social nuances like we can.

Pulling out key quotes relevant to you, recognising top online influencers and  spotting marketing and research opportunities requires a personal touch. A human touch. Analysing what people are interested in, what they like, what they don’t like in the context of your business goals requires research expertise, not technology.

Each buzz monitoring tool has its own set of strengths and weaknesses and by using a combination of them alongside human analysis, you can gain valuable insight into your target audience; you can develop new and improved ways to market to them and even develop new products that will appeal to them. You can also discover ways to differentiate yourselves from your competitors.

Stats, info, words and numbers

Without the human, buzz tools spew out stats and info, words and numbers. These need conversion to something meaningful. Buzz tools pull in huge amounts of information but they also create a lot of white noise.

Working out who your key communities are and how their internal cultures work takes time. Your buzz tools will help you find some – but not all – of them. They also won’t help you to prioritise which communities you should pay more attention to.

If you spend the time really listening to the communities that have the most value to you by combining your buzz tools with manual research and analysis, you’ll truly reap the benefits of buzz monitoring – but don’t fall into the trap of thinking that you can pay simply for a key terms to be tracked and that’s it. Job done. You’ll just be wasting your money. True buzz monitoring requires financial investment – but it reaps real business rewards.

Listen, listen and listen again

The only way to get a true feel of what a community is like and what they are talking about is to have an expert in there really looking at it. Use buzz tools to help identify communities and comments but you should always spend the time to get the context from the community.

Social media – including buzz monitoring – is all about people. It doesn’t just stop at choosing a tool and letting it get on with it. Get an expert to spend the time delving into what the results mean in the grander scheme of things and you’ll see the true value of buzz monitoring.