Monitoring trends and brand mentions is a key component of success in social media. The problem is that monitoring (and the subsequent management) is reactive as opposed to proactive like we really want and need it as brands; but it doesn't have to be that way - at least not any more.
"Too often, even the most aggressive brands are left chasing the conversation in social media, or hoping for that fortuitous alignment of real-time events and content they happen to have on hand," said Randy Browning, co-founder and chief executive officer of Blab, a newly launched platform for predicting social media conversations.
You didn't read that wrong - Blab's technology actually promises to apply its predictive analytics technologies to social data streams in order to show brands and social media managers what their audiences will be talking about in advance.
"With Blab, any brand, organization or cause can transform from a reactive stance to a proactive one; from followers to leaders, with a high degree of confidence in their strategy and their content," said Browning. "Since we started Blab, brands have been telling us that this changes the game for social media engagement. Now that our platform is released to the public, we embrace the challenge of proving them right."
Blab essentially is helping marketers know what their audience will be talking about in the future by capturing "lifestyle audiences" as opposed to demographic audiences in an effort to discover conversation context important to them. The result is details on relevant - but non obvious - commonalities in conversations from which insights can be gathered to inform business intelligence, content development and brand management.