Listening to Digital Chatter by Audience, Not Keywords

adweek reporting:
Hey brands, want to know what your audience is buzzing about when they’re not buzzing about you? Communications firm Porter Novelli has a new tool out today that it says will make that easier.
Called TrendingTarget, the service is similar to a slew of social media monitoring products that listen to and analyze publicly available social media posts from consumers. But the company said the one key difference is that it organizes digital chatter around target audiences, not keywords.

Say you’re a retailer interested in listening to online buzz about your company, conventional monitoring would likely start by searching for keywords, hashtags, or brand names that your target audience would chat about.

But Porter Novelli said its approach is to first use publicly available information to assemble an online sample of a target consumer group (from moms to Michele Bachmann fans to outdoor enthusiasts). Then it tracks and analyzes the full range of digital conversation and displays the information on an online dashboard that shows real-time and historical trending topics, as well as sample tweets. (It only includes Twitter for now but plans to expand to other social channels later this year.)
“What’s powerful about an audience-first approach is that you don’t have to guide the tool; instead, the tool guides you,” said Gary Stockman, CEO of Porter Novelli. “In keyword search you have to anticipate what the audience is talking about: your product, brand, your competitor’s product, your competitor’s brand. You wind up with these exhaustive lists of keywords. Unfortunately, if you haven’t anticipated what the audience might be talking about, you might not hear what they’re saying.”
By listening to the full range of an audience’s conversations, he said, you not only know when they’re talking about your company, but you also know when they’re talking about a competitor or interesting trends that might help you make inroads for future online conversations or marketing campaigns.
http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/listening-digital-chatter-audience-not-keywords-135217