Alias v Tracking Systems
So I decided to compare data between the iphone and Nokia 95, two phones which I suspected shared common air in the blogosphere. The N95,…ah!
Something that Brandwatch brings to light is the hold a particular brand name has over a brand tracking system. There were 2284 mentions for ‘iphone’ last week, and 180 for ‘Nokia 95′. Really? So few for the new Nokia? To what extent are these volume results manipulated by the brand tracking friendliness of these respective brand names?
It’s reasonable to say that iphone is the iphone is the iphone – at least from the point of view of the tracker – and this is all that matters here. But the ‘Nokia 95′ is also the ‘N95′. And here lies the difficulty when fixing tracking parameters: the relationship between the phone itself and the name it is being tracked under is compromised. The new Nokia phone more commonly goes under the name of ‘N95′.
The tracking system has revealed its own worst enemy to us: aliases. They fragment the aim of the tracker to such an extent that unless vigilance is maintained, results only tell part of any story - even though this may look like the whole one.
So I guess what I’m saying is that the tracking system sometimes needs to be tracked too. Otherwise any data associated with any brand will be limited in value before the word go. Get the names right, and the brand will follow, to paraphrase violently Kevin Costner’s friend in ‘The field of dreams’.
In order to ensure that all relevant mentions out there for a brand are gathered together for analysis, first of all we must gather all the names. I guess this was very quickly labelled the ‘Orange’ problem: ‘Orange’ on its own gets you nowhere because it takes you everywhere. The tracker has to be configured with care before any results are straight and true enough to be analysed with care.
Of course, the User Interface of the system will know and tell you nothing of this back story, except it does. These numbers I found were suspicious. So, of course, we now include ‘N95′, and with this, add the relevant exclusion terms that this alias requires. Of course things are made more beguiling when we are talking about the world of blogs and forums, where a brand carries the most of aliases of all.