No one with any tact would ever tell you that you look fat to your face. But a sea of anonymous netizens will tell you in real-time on multiple channels. Kim Kardashian, Beyonce and Twilight’s Stephenie Meyer all come up on real time search engines if you type in “looks fat”. And each of these women would see these painful comments if they listened to the publicist who told them to “measure brand conversation”. When we last covered UberVU, the company had just launched ContextVoice API – an API that helps developers create tools for conversation tracking. Today, the company added new search functionality to ContextVoice with a number of useful filtering options.
Said uberVU CEO Vladimir Oane, “We’ve re-architected our system to deal with real-time search, but we also discovered that nobody reads through the thousands of comments that a conversation might have. The new layer of conversational and community analytics shows the big picture, while allowing you to dig deep to find individual comments that are interesting.”
The lesson here is that while we’re meant to “embrace the chaos” of audience feedback, it’s best to look at the forest (or overall reactions) rather than the individual (and sometimes spiteful) trees.
While competitor Infegy displays relevant web chatter, UberVU goes one step further by offering developers a chance to create their own mash up and filtering tools. The ContextVoice API’s new search functionality allows developers to measure public reactions within specified time frames. Explains the company, “A conversation with 10 reactions in the last minute may be hotter than one with 1500 reactions distributed over a month. But the hot conversation matters more, because that’s the one that has the attention and momentum.”
Suggested mashups include social media dashboards to measure outreach, memetrackers to get the lowdown on entire industries, community dialogue tools to pull comments back onto your site and comment tracking for stock trading purposes. To check out the search API visit the ContextVoice developer page.
