Monitoring & Analyzing Social Media

Using SM2 Themes to Track Conversation

Using SM2 themes is a great way to visually see a whole conversation in the social media world. I used my SM2 account to search my Twitter account (bobbo0521). It pulled back 693 results. After my search, I ran a theme to see the trends in my conversation.

We have 2 themes in SM2: Basic and Advanced. A basic theme will take popular words or terms from content, and display them as a Cloud. An advanced theme detects groupings of topics or themes. An advanced theme graph will provide insight by displaying groups of blogs clustered around common themes and the relationships between the clusters.

I prefer the basic theme, as the visual representation is more useful to me. Below is an image of my Twitter Theme.

(The bigger, bolder words appear more often than the others in my Twitter conversations)

Some of my more popular words include “blog”, “plugin” and “wordpress”. If you drilldown into the “Wordpress” term, I made a few posts complaining about wordpress issues, and asking for help. If you were a wordpress employee, this would give you the ability to see that I was having issues, and directly engage to resolve the problem.

This cloud also displays other Twitter users that I most often communicate with. The value here is not only knowing what I am saying, but who I am talking with, which would allow you to engage in a conversation with a broader spectrum of users.

For my Advanced Theme Graph I chose a search on Woopra, an up and coming web analytics tool (my twitter example above doesn’t have enough variation to really show the value of an advanced theme).

Here we see a cluster in the bottom right which contains “wordpress”, “posts”, and “plugin” keywords. Another cluster contains “blog”, “wordpress” and “site”. These two clusters are relatively close to each other, signifying that they have content that is similar.

At the top of the graph we have a small cluster with the keywords “search”, “back”, and “blog”. The distance between this and the previous two indicates that the results have little in common. Glancing over the keywords, the bottom/right of this graph seems to be mostly conversation about how Woopra works with websites. The top/left of the graph is conversation about how Woopra compares to competitors.

The value of theme graphs is visual representation of online conversation. Using a basic graph you can see the individual words that are most used in a conversation. Using an advanced graph gives the ability to view a conversation by common topics.