PR Newswire Debuts Social Media Tool

Media services firm PR Newswire has announced the EMEA launch of an intelligence tool, Social Media Metrics. The tool is powered by Sentiment Metrics, a real-time analysis system and dashboard breaking down mentions of brands and companies by sentiment, demographics, influence and authority.

The service promises to monitor, analyse and measure the impact of what is being said about an organisation, brand, spokesperson or competitor across the social media landscape, including more than 20 million blogs, 5 million forum posts, and 30,000 online news sources, social networks and microblogs including Twitter.

Users can build customised keyword searches, and select by specific geographic, demographic and language parameters: they can also pick particular sites to monitor.

Product Manager Allison Murphy comments: 'Sorting through the reams of information in the social media universe and interpreting the data effectively can be an extremely daunting task. With the launch of the Social Media Metrics service, communications professionals can now understand and intelligently determine how key audiences and the public in general are reacting to and even dictating the way their organisation and brands are portrayed within the various online and social media circles.'

The tool's reporting options include Authority Score, showing the number of inbound links to a site or network from other social media sites; Top Topics, which identifies the most frequently discussed topics surrounding a brand and/or its competitors; and Sentiment Report, which reports on whether discussions are positive, neutral or negative, with the option to isolate negative mentions and warn clients of a potential crisis. Says Murphy: 'The longer it takes to respond to a negative situation developing on social media channels, the worse the situation could be. An alert dedicated only to negative mentions helps to ensure that users can respond to potentially explosive situations before they spin out of control.' Users can tabulate data in customisable charts in a variety of formats including pdfs.

PR Newswire, a subsidiary of United Business Media Ltd (UBM), has offices in 16 countries across North and South America, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.

Web sites: www.sentimentmetrics.com and www.prnewswire.com .