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 You know something’s time has come when not one but TWO systems to measure it are launched in the same week. And this week, that thing is social media – or more specifically, Arabic-language social media.
Yesterday Media Watch formally launched its SocialEyez (see what they did there?) monitoring service, while today Mediastow hit back with its own offering, which integrates monitoring of social media with that of more traditional outlets.
Media Watch was claiming a first, though, for its “natural language processing” ability for Arabic-language social media sources, which allows – or attempts to allow – for different Arabic dialects, misspellings, and the wide range of both names and transliterated brand names that crop up across the Arab world.
“We’re really setting a world first by putting together technologies which are only focused on the capture of Arabic social media conversations,” said Mazen Nahawi, president of Media Watch’s parent company News Group.
For its part, Mediastow also boasted of the ability to peruse Arabic-language media, again using tech it has developed itself. Both services are quite modestly priced, with SocialEyez coming in at between $500 and $800 per month, depending on requirements, and Mediastow’s at around $400.
Media Watch’s SocialEyez service has been up and running for around six months and already has more than 30 clients, around two-thirds of which are government entities, according to Nahawi – although he was quick to point out that this was more towards the municipal, transportation and health-focused departments, rather than shady security agencies (which have their own... ahem, monitoring systems...).
Interestingly, though the Media Watch guys did say they have had significant interest from HR departments within companies, which were keen to see what their employees were saying out on teh interwebs.
Media Watch – and presumably Mediastow would say much the same thing – claims to be able to get a good sense of what’s being talked about around any given subject, up to and including the context in which a particular keyword is being talked about, although this requires more demanding analytics.
At yesterday’s launch, the discussion veered off to an interesting tangent: how “right” is it to be searching all these conversations and opinions? Is there a legitimate right to privacy about what one does on one’s Facebook account, say, in terms of putting a comment on a fan page (something which is visible to pretty much anyone, as opposed to one’s own profile)?
In practical terms, Media Watch says it respects any requests not to index certain content – for example, using a standard “robots.txt” file, which is basically an instruction to search engines on what not to look at on a website.
In more general terms, we at AdNation tend to take quite an absolutist view: if you’re putting something in the public domain, under your name or an identity which can be traced to you, then you have no right to privacy over it – no matter which or how many people you expect to look at the content.
After all, no-one’s forcing you to tweet that nasty comment about your employer, or whatever. And as ignorance of the law has traditionally not been a defence in most of the world, why should it be any different online?
Perhaps more of a worry is that, rather than acting as the Thought Police, users of these services will instead be playing the Thought Extractors – using one’s online opinions to work out how best to sell yet more random crap to everyone. Aka: marketing.
It should perhaps bring us up short, when we realise that technology now gets marketers closer than ever to being able to listen in to people’s private conversations – we perhaps wouldn’t go so far as to say thoughts. And even if people should realise their online warbling are NOT private, the harsh reality is that most people do not quite grasp this.
Still, for better or worse, it’s all out there now – and pretty much anyone can have a sniff round it, thanks to firms such as Mediastow and Media Watch.
Social media in the region is perhaps less developed than elsewhere in the world, but given the state of the Middle East’s media (viz, its utter lack of balls, speaking generally), social media monitoring offers clients a potentially more realistic, perhaps even honest, view of public perception.
Which, provided you don’t blame people for their opinions, is probably a good thing. Probably.
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