How to Know If Your Monitor Rules Are Too Broad or Too Narrow

✅ DEFINE TARGET DATA

 Determine what the ideal mention looks like for your strategy:

      A mention referencing an experience with UPS' delivery service.

💡Keep the end in mind. Questions to ask yourself may include something like, “How will this data be used?”

I’m an analyst using Nuvi Listen to help Amazon’s customer care team manage online conversations around people’s experience with Amazon’s delivery service. If a person is taking to the internet with raving or disconcerting comments about Amazon’s delivery service, I’ll want to capture it in real-time so that Amazon’s customer care team can take appropriate action in a timely manner. 

💡Not sure what keywords to query in your monitor? Search engine results can be a helpful resource to audit mentions you’re looking for and therefore keyword ideas used to find them.

✅ DEFINE THE SCOPE

In addition to solidifying the keywords, phrases, hashtags, and social mentions, you should also determine any contextual parameters that need to be included in the monitor’s criteria. One question to ask yourself might be, “Does language, network source, author source, or location of the mention matter?”. Doing so may require adding or removing rule sets or even rule groups to your monitor.

Example of an ideal mention:

SCENARIO A:  When Monitor Rules Are Too Broad

Example of broad monitor rules:

The symptoms to look out for:

Example 1:

Although the monitor includes one of the monitor’s keywords, the context is irrelevant.

SOLUTION:

Too broad of monitor rules can be improved by removing, adding, or adjusting your rules in some form or fashion.

• Put all brand-related keywords into one-word rule set AND all of the contextual keywords in a second rule of the same rule group. This will allow any combination of these keywords to be brought into the monitor. See the example below for help.

• For irrelevant language(s) coming through, add a language rule.
• For irrelevant authors coming through, add a social profile exclusion rule.
• If irrelevant mentions do not have an author or language in common, try to identify keywords in common.

SCENARIO B: Monitors Rules Are Too Narrow

The symptoms to look for:

In contrast to the above issue, you’ll know if your monitor rules are too narrow when the monitor pulls in fewer results (or none at all) than anticipated for the conversation.

SOLUTION:

• Check your rules for a combination of rules or terms that are too specific or are in conflict with each other that would make the query unlikely for conversation around it.

• Read each of the rule sets out loud like a narrative to help catch any oversights in logic when configuring rules and terms.

✅ THE MONITOR PREVIEW IS YOUR BEST FRIEND

Whether you’re building a new monitor or refining an existing one, online conversation can still be volatile and unpredictable, making it difficult to manage at times. The monitor preview feature is designed to mitigate those issues by showing you historical data that matches your rule setup. 

Always if possible, run a monitor preview before saving the monitor. This will allow you to estimate the volume of mentions and preview mentions to identify any irrelevancies that may warrant further rule refinement.