Kendra Ryan, Knowledge Management Coordinator at Stikeman Elliot in Calgary was kind enough to share a tip with me. Kendra and I connected through the CBA Research Lawyers South section meeting where I shared some tips on using social media sites for legal research. Slides, Handout.
This website searches social media tools across the world for whatever topic you'd like. It's used commonly by people performing CI reports. It's a neat way to bring back social media hits that may be overlooked on a larger search engine like Google. This site even tries to break down the sentiment of the articles (positive, neutral or negative), however it's rating is based on the connotations of the words written and is often skewed. It also tells you when the last time it was written about, who the main authors are, sources, hashtags, etc. You're able to subscribe and set up email alerts. It works for company names (Stikeman Elliott), industry hot topics (oilsands), things in the news (Suncor merger), and products (Ford Ranger).
It also works for people. I searched "Simon Fodden" and got some neat data. Screen shot
The sentiment is an interesting metric. I agree with Kendra that it is not entirely reliable, but interesting none the less. Some of the useful bits in the sidebar that socialmention.com displays are Sentiment,Top Keywords, Top Users, Top Hashtags, PostRank, and Sources – all with clickable links of course.
The only caveat on the value of the site is that I would have expected a larger set of results.
Thanks for sharing Kendra!
