Social Radar, by Infegy, collects millions of articles and conversations from traditional media, social networks and blogs and captures them in a brand snapshot. As Read Write Web says, they know “when you’ve been bad or good.”
This is a corporate version of what we talked about in our previous post, “Careful Job Seekers Think About Online Presence”, and was recently reinforced by President Obama in a Spetember 8th speech to a group of 14- and 15-year-old students. “I want everybody here to be careful about what you post on Facebook, because in the YouTube age, whatever you do, it will be pulled up again later somewhere in your life.” An MSNBC slideshow gives examples of social networking cautionary tales.
Since January 2007, Social Radar has been crawling millions of pages and can compile a dossier-style picture of a company’s successes and flaws. Using the recent Domino’s Pizza disaster as an example, Social Radar shows a tag cloud of frequently used words, along with a percentage of negative and positive comments.
In this case, the opinions toward Domino’s Pizza went from good to bad in mid April, with internet speed, when two Domino’s Pizza workers in North Carolina uploaded a YouTube video of their less-than-sanitary kitchen antics. (Visit Read Write Web to see a news story video). While the employees were both fired and the franchise was closed for sanitation, the brand’s social stock still took a nose dive in both traditional and social media.
Such information can be helpful because Social Radar can be used to measure the success of their campaign to recapture consumer confidence. Other uses include the success of product launches or political campaigns…maybe even trading decisions, with their ratings of Fortune 500 companies and top brands across the web.