As television and media companies make social media
a more central part of their content strategies, social media specialist
Crimson Hexagon has announced major enhancements to its Crimson Hexagon
ForSight platform for social media monitoring and analysis. The upgrades will
allow Crimson to track a wider array of data and makes it easier for users to
track and analyze over 20 billion social media conversations.
The upgraded platform also illustrates some of the
improved technologies that can be used to better understand the impact of
social media. Unlike some competing tracking services that focus on key words,
Crimson Hexagon uses advanced statistical methods developed at Harvard
University to eliminate irrelevant data and better quantify actual opinions,
the company's CEO Scott Centurino said in an interview.
"To realize business value from social media monitoring
and analysis, companies need to do more than count how many times their brand
is mentioned," Centurino said.
With the expanded social media tracking platform,
Crimson Hexagon is currently indexing more than 82 million social media posts
per day and about 2.5 billion a month.
Crimson Hexagon is perhaps best known for the
social media tracking it does for companies like CNN and Dow Jones. CNN, for
example, used Crimson Hexagon's technology to track reactions to President Barack
Obama's State of the Union speech earlier this year and the cable news net
plans to use the service to track real-time reaction on blogs, Twitter,
Facebook, forums and other social media to the mid-term elections.
But the company also does an increasing amount of
behind-the-scenes work tracking social media usage for broadcast networks,
cable channels, ad agencies, PR firms, technology providers like Microsoft and
some specific programs like Glee, said Centurino, who adds that they've
seen growing demand for social media analysis by television and media companies
that want to better track the way viewers see their brands and
programs.
"It can be a very useful tool for understanding how viewers are reacting
to a new program or your network," he said.
