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ALERT™ Tip: Geo-Targeted Twitter Search in Hootsuite

Twitter is a great tool for discovering what people are saying about a company, brand, or any other topic. However, if you are only interested in conversations from a certain location, using Twitter’s search function might not be very helpful.

Overall, Hootsuite is a great tool for managing your company’s Twitter account. One particular feature makes it exceptional for finding conversations from a specific location.

Geo-targeted Search

Here’s how you use it:

1. Log into Hootsuite (or create a new account if you don’t have one).
2. Click the magnifying glass located at the top right.
3. Enter the desired keyword in the Search Twitter field.
4. Click the circular (cross-hair) located right of the search field.
5. In the window that pops up, click the Save as Stream button.

The resulting stream will show tweets that include your desired keyword, in your proximity.

Now if you want tweets from a location that is different from your current city, you will first need to determine the latitude and longitude of the desired location. You can use http://itouchmap.com/latlong.html to figure out the coordinates.

How to Edit Geo-Targeted Search

1. Locate the stream you just created in Hootsuite.
2. Click the inverted triangle located at the top right of the stream.
3. Select Preferences from the drop down menu.
4. In the search query field, replace the existing coordinates with the desired coordinates (make sure you only replace the coordinates section – bolded in this example “canucks geocode:49.2639013,-123.1117966,25km”).
5. If you want to expand or restrict the geo-target radius, change the distance configuration in the search query (25km is the default distance).
6. Click the Save Changes button.

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Brought to you by ALERT™

ALERT™ is a proprietary system for creating online strategies that deliver measurable results. The five stage process (Assess, Locate, Engage, Respond & Track) and web application helps traditional marketing, advertising and PR agencies learn and adapt their skills to become online power houses.

For more information on licensing ALERT™, contact us.

Tags: ALERT™, geo-target, HootSuite, licensing, magnify digital, search, Twitter

Bad publicity now means less publicity, on Google

Last week the New York Times uncovered a story about an online vendor who has managed to leverage his bad customer service reputation into a top ranking on Google’s search engine.

The business owner was quoted saying “I’ve exploited this opportunity because it works. No matter where they post their negative comments, it helps my return on investment.  So I decided, why not use that negativity to my advantage?”  This strategy appears to have worked.  The more furious the online chatter, the higher the site ranked in Google search, resulting in greater awareness of the brand and an increase in sales.

Google blogged saying “that being bad is, and hopefully will always be, bad for business in Google’s search results.  And after quickly putting together a team Google is satisfied that they have developed a solution and it is already live.

Google outlined some obvious ways of solving the issue including blocking the offender, using sentiment analysis and placing user reviews next to search results, therefore exposing the negativity towards them.  Instead they have created a new algorithm that detects extremely poor user experience and have incorporated it into their search ranking as an initial solution.

In this particular case, incorporating sentiment analysis in search ranking results is the right thing:  shady business no longer profits from bad customer experience.  But is sentiment analysis always a good thing?

There are reasons why we might not want Google to determine good sentiment vs bad for us in its web ranking.  For example, if we wanted to look up something political and there was negative sentiment surrounding a particular leader, it may prove very difficult to learn more about a political situation.  Sentiment analysis may also filter out bad reviews that are often very useful in doing research when making a purchase.  The internet has always been a great resource for finding both good and bad reviews and information.

Although it seems as if Google has squashed the idea that any publicity is good publicity, there are sure to be more complex search discrepancies coming our way.  Sentiment analysis has not been, and most likely will never be, completely mastered.  The intricacies and nuances in language are difficult enough to comprehend face-to-face, let alone trying to develop an algorithm to decipher and make sense of it all (think: sarcasm).  So, for now, we should continue to use our own intuition when considering sentiment analysis in search and maybe even dig a little further if we can’t find what we are looking for.  After all, we can’t rely on Google to do everything for us.

Taylor

Tags: algorithm, google, ranking, search, search results, sentiment analysis

The Near-Future of Search

Happy New Year!

It seems appropriate to write my first blog post of the year on possibilities. Here on the Magnify team we get uber excited hearing about new apps and how the internet is changing and fluxing, even as we sleep.

We have to admit, making a search online still takes  much effort and analysis on our part, before we even type in our search terms. But what if instead of coming up with key words, we needed only to speak in conversation and have our computer autonomously select, from our language and tone, key words to search on?

And, what if in the chaotic midst of preparing a four-course roast dinner we could simply turn to our ‘wired fridge’ and demand ‘port reduction’ and set the computer to work? Seconds later, the waterproof screen embedded on our fridge door would display instructions on how to make the sauce, from our favourite cooking website, along with a live chat linked up to a chef-help-line. And if we added the word ‘twitter’ to our demand, the ever intelligent fridge might send off a quick tweet ‘help! with port reduction?’. Imagine a fridge taking care of those trivial but extremely practical posts one makes on a daily basis?! We may not be too far off…

Photo by Mike Warren, Flickr

This article by Google VP, Search Products & User Experience, Marissa Mayer, is a flex-your-brain exercise in imagining the future of search, and how our devices could (will) become an even more integrated part of our lives.

In the article, Marissa describes Google’s ideal search engine:

“Your best friend with instant access to all the world’s facts and a photographic memory of everything you’ve seen and know. That search engine could tailor answers to you based on your preferences, your existing knowledge and the best available information; it could ask for clarification and present the answers in whatever setting or media worked best.”

Katy

Tags: future, google, search, smart fridge