Glossary
What is social listening?
Social listening is the ongoing collection and analysis of public online discussion about a person, brand or event, to catch negative stories early, see how they spread and give the response something to stand on.
Also known as: Media monitoring, Reputation monitoring, 舆情监测
Social listening follows public discussion: who is talking about a person, a brand or an event, where, in what tone, and how the talk spreads. In Chinese it is 舆情监测 (yúqíng jiāncè).
What does social listening involve?
- A keyword list: the person’s name, the names they are known by, company names, common misspellings and homophones, and related people and events.
- Alerts: a warning when negative content passes a threshold set in advance.
- Tracing the spread: finding where a story started and who carried it, to decide whether to respond, complain to the platform or take legal steps.
- Review: a record afterwards of the timeline, what was done and what happened.
Which monitoring systems are there in China?
Each in the vendor’s own words:
- Zhiwei Shijian keeps an event library and an event ranking that shows each event’s heat and its share of public discussion;1
- Baidu AI Cloud’s public-opinion service offers a data-subscription API for creating and querying real-time monitoring tasks and for opinion analysis;2
- Newrank’s social listening product monitors a brand’s volume on social media and its positive and negative mentions.3
Further reading
- Monitoring and crisis response in a long-term engagement: Reputation & risk
Notes
- 知微事见 (Zhiwei Shijian (event tracking))
- 舆情服务 (Baidu AI Cloud: public-opinion service (documentation))
- 新榜——新媒体，找新榜 (Newrank)