SocialSense: Finding conversations you don't know you need

One trend in social media is plugging in with new listening tools to figure out what consumers are saying about your brand. Radian6 and PeopleBrowsr track buzz with all sorts of stats, using Boolean logic around certain keywords. If you're Pepsi, you can hunt for Pepsi + Love, Pepsi + Hate, and find the key influencers on Twitter and elsewhere saying great or awful things about your brand.

But what if something out there is happening/tweeting/chatting and you're not smart enough to search for it? Say, what if you assume people talk about oral hygiene and what people really reference is a toothbrush?

SocialSense is a new platform that, yes, tries to make sense of this. The service has three features: The ability to segment small or large chunks of social media to only listen to the people or outlets you think have real influence over your brand; some media planning tools helping marketers identify sites with highest relevant conversations; and our favorite -- the ability to surface conversations related to your brand that you didn't think to search for.

Moving beyond keywords

"A lot of monitoring tools are very keyword-based," says Derek Hornsby of Networked Insights, which launched SocialSense 2.0 in July. "But if you look at trending topics on Twitter, there are all these conversations out there, and it is very difficult for any one person to get anything relevant to their campaign." In one example, a mobile handset maker did not think to search for the term "roaming" -- but roaming was a main theme consumers brought up when talking about cell-phone service, and elevating it to the marketers' radar allowed them to find new intelligence they would have otherwise missed.

SocialSense cracks the "discovery" challenge by using AI-type algorithms to find themes in conversations related to your brand, product or service, and then alerts you when a concept you did not expect begins to explode. It's an intriguing idea, finding things you didn't know you need. Now if only it could predict what we need in tomorrow's stock market.

Image: Lepiaf Geo