Toronto-based startup TrendSpottr, which provides tools to help businesses identify trends before they get huge so they can better capitalize on those opportunities for advertising, editorial or other purposes, today announced the launch of TrendSpottr Alerts. This new offering, which has been in beta testing for a few months now, is aimed at giving high-level stakeholders who don’t have time to manage a dashboard real-time notifications via email when something important to their company or field is on the verge of blowing up.
The frequency of the alerts and in what areas they’re triggered can be customized by a user, on a freemium basis where a number of broad areas are available for free, but users can pay a subscription to access a broader range of alerts for any term or subject they choose. The alerts are grouped into three urgency categories, and thanks to a brand new partnership with Lybmix also announced today, they are also analyzed for sentiment, so you can tell if they’re positive, negative or neutral. That’s especially important if you’re a brand manager and want to see PR disasters in the making and potentially cut them off before they go extremely viral.
Users receiving the email alerts can also click through for a more detailed look at the trending item identified, complete with a single page analytics summary that details the timeline for how frequently the trend is being mentioned on social media, the dispersion of sentiment across mentions and a more granular pie-chart sentiment breakdown that shows how people are feeling about a topic across essentially various emotional criteria, rather than just the cut-and-dry “Good/Bad/Neutral” you’ll see from other similar platforms.
“What Alerts does is it sends you that information, that is based on trending information, that is exceptional, so that you can get it pushed to you, and with Lymbix what we wanted to do was add a level of sentiment to it,” TrendSpottr CEO Mark Zohar told me in an interview. “So you can quickly see it in your email inbox where you live, you can see what it is and see its sentiment very quickly and act on it, either by delegating, sharing or so on.”
The whole point is to essentially create an early response system that doesn’t require mobilizing an entire chain of command. Emails provide all the information you need at a glance to get started on a disaster response plan (as in the case of something like the totally crazy Manti Te’o story Notre Dame is dealing with right now) or to instantly capitalize on an opportunity. Zohar notes that a lot of these trend opportunities are short-lived, so having all the info you need to formulate an instant response is much more important than it has been in the past.
Adding sentiment analysis to the TrendSpottr platform should be a huge benefit for its users, even though it seems like a small thing. The difference between having to figure out what kind of tone people are using in discussing a topic and having it explained instantly could mean the difference between committing a major gaffe and pulling off a major coup in a social media campaign designed around trending content.
Alerts will be available direct from TrendSpottr, but the company is also going to offer a white-label solution that allows its clients to offer relevant alerts under their own masthead to their customers and users via email subscriptions. So if you’re a brand consultancy, and you want to keep your clients apprised of trends in their industry but do so under your own flag, that’s something TrendSpottr can set up.
There’s a new timeline for managing and monitoring trends thanks to Twitter, and it’s about anticipation, not reaction and response. That’s what TrendSpottr and Zohar have concerned themselves with, and Alerts is another way to try to help companies anticipate the curve. It could end up being just another email digest cluttering up your inbox, but for the right manager and in the right use case, it could also be a great new way for high-level staff to get a ground level view of their business.