Flame war management handling crises in the social media age

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Volume 7 │ Issue 3
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This article is an extract from Performance, Volume 7, Issue 3, August 2015. The full journal is available at
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Tools — it won’t work otherwise
An early warning system is core to
professional flame war management.
Comprehensive monitoring forms
the foundation, as in all social media
measurement activities. The source set
should not just include the usual social
media channels but must contain the
Twitter Firehose. 5 However, the API 6 that is
generally available — the Gardenhose — only
delivers 10% of all possible Twitter posts.
This means that, during an emergency,
the feared storm could be brewing but its
full force undetected because monitoring
via the Gardenhose is only giving initial
indications.
Efficient automated analysis tools are
indispensable. Such tools provide structure
to the otherwise unstructured data
obtained during monitoring and allow the
organization to process that data. Modern
tools are able to achieve standardization
through root word formation, spelling
correction and acronym conversion. Clauses
are separated and entities such as volumes,
units of measure or characteristics are
automatically singled out.
Rapid, authentic and
honest answers from
all employees at the
customer contact
point are essential,
but require dedicated
training.
5. Firehose is the name given to the enormous volume of
real-time Tweets that flow from Twitter each day. Access to
this firehose can be obtained from Twitter.
6. API is the Application Programming Interface. It allows
external developers to develop technology that rely on data
from a specific source, in this instance, Twitter.
The linguistic analysis available using
part-of-speech tagging (POST) offers
enormous evaluation potential. POST is
software that reads text and assigns a tag
to each word based on its categorization as,
for example, a noun, verb or adjective. With
this preprocessing, the essential semantic
analysis gains a stronger foundation and
expression than the usual monitoring tools
that rely on lists of key words.
Apart from the quantitative analysis, a
powerful tool must also be able to provide
the qualitative classification, grouping and
visualization of the results. In advance of a
crisis, no one can say which terms will be
relevant. But through the automatic output
of clusters and the definition of thresholds,
spontaneous alarms can be generated for
terms that are not in the monitoring set.
The consequence is a significant speed
advantage in a flame war.
Individually tailored dashboards and
cockpits form the communication center
of the early warning system. Moreover,
by applying monitoring and analytics, it is
possible to identify Influencers in order to
directly communicate with them. Similarly,
it is conceivable to recruit and acquire
an unpaid “army,” which can be asked to
support in the event of a crisis.
Nonetheless, in order to be prepared for
the emergency, it is strongly recommended
to provide regular training and perform fire
drills, i.e., practice drills, with all involved
parties in the organization.
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