Geographic Search Engine Finds Location-Specific Tweets, MediaGeographic Search Engine Finds Location-Specific Tweets, Media

11 Management Systems That Can Help You Get A Handle On Social

Post a smart phone photo of your family at Mount Rushmore, and there is a good chance that someone associated with the South Dakota Department of Tourism will see it--regardless of whether you add a caption or hashtag to identify the contents of the photo.

Lawrence & Schiller, a marketing and advertising firm with offices in Sioux Falls and Deadwood, S.D., that works with the tourism agency is an early user of Geofeedia, a social media search and monitoring tool that captures social posts according to their geographic coordinates. "It's a way for us to engage with users whom most of the time we wouldn't see, because they may not like our Facebook page or follow us on Twitter," said Carrie Burns, an associate account executive at L&S. Her firm uses Salesforce.com's Radian6 as its primary social media monitoring tool, but Geofeedia has given her firm and its counterparts at the Department of Tourism a way of identifying people who might not be talking about South Dakota but they are in fact visiting it and posting photos of the state to share with their friends.

"We capture authentic sources at the site, at the location," said Phil Harris, CEO of Geofeedia. "The user has to legitimately be there," as reported by their smartphone's GPS tracking, he said. Smart phone users who post photos typically have that feature enabled, he said.

Although Foursquare popularized the notion of the geographic check-in, many other social media services now offer the option to include your coordinates when you post a message, photo, or video. In fact, Foursquare is so far not on the list of services Geofeedia monitors, which includes Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Flickr, and Picasa.

Geofeedia allows you to find a landmark or an address on a Bing map, then draw the shape of the area from within which social posts should be captured. Harris said the product has been designed as an enterprise service, with tools for ongoing monitoring and saved searches for specific locations and for sharing the results internally.

[ See how you compare. How Largest Companies' Social Efforts Stack Up. ]

That capability fit well with the campaign L&S developed to promote tourism in 2012. "We wanted to do something different. Instead of just answering when they reached out through Facebook or Twitter to us, we wanted a way to reach out to them while they're traveling across the state of South Dakota," she said. So the tourism promotion team might not only see your photos of Mt. Rushmore or the Corn Palace, they might write you back to compliment you on them, or ask permission to repost them to the tourism department's Pinterest board. In the process, they typically suggest other places you might visit.

"We're kind of upselling them, but also thanking them," Burns said.

Geofeedia captures photos and tweets from on and around Mount Rushmore.

In addition to tracking the area around key tourism locations, her marketing team has used Geofeedia when the tourism agency's Mount Rushmore mascots go on the road to do promotions, capturing images of people posing with their favorite stony presidents in Kansas City or Des Moines--tracking those locations just for the duration of the visit. Thomson Reuters is using the same service to pinpoint social media associated with news events. In April, when a jet fighter crashed into an apartment complex in Virginia Beach, Reuters at first was playing catch up with local TV news outlets, who were the first to get access to user-generated video from the site, said Matthew Keys, deputy social media editor. "We were finding it difficult to reach people out there, but then I logged into [Geofeedia], drew a map around the apartment complex, and we were able to get these great Instagram photos and video that we tweeted out and sourced to the photographer," he said.

Keys said he had developed other techniques over the years for finding news content in social media, but Geofeedia takes a lot of the labor out of the process of finding posts or media from a specific location. "It's much easier for us to vet where a photo was taken," he said. Although it's possible for someone to override the geographic coordinates attached to a picture, "most people wouldn't even think to do it," he said.

In addition to marketing and news gathering, Geofeedia says its service has many other potential uses. For example, security managers at sports venues might want to monitor social media for indications of trouble in the stands. Police agencies and local governments might also want to monitor specific locations for signs of trouble, or other issues they need to address. Other possible customers include disaster relief organizations and executive surveillance, in the latter case tracking whatever location an executive is visiting to be alerted to protests or other trouble.

Both L&S and Reuters have been using Geofeedia as a free trial service, although Burns said she is on the verge of signing a contract. She sees the value because, previously, as people traveled across the state, "we used to have no way of seeing whether sharing photos and what they're tweeting about."

For the tourism department, using the service effectively requires checking it on a daily basis, because it captures about 24 hours worth of activity, Burns said. One of the improvements she is looking for is an improved reporting capability, or possibly integration with a general social media monitoring tool such as Radian6.

Keys said he sees potential for Reuters to make more use of Geofeedia, although so far it's not something he uses on a daily basis. Although it has proven useful in spot news situations such as that jet plane crash, he has some concerns about sourcing photos, because social media users will often re-post something from other websites. Use of the tool is so far confined to his department, which is mostly responsible for promoting Reuters content on social media, he said. His group also assists with using social media as a research tool, but that's a smaller part of the job.

"We've talked about making Geofeedia into a tool that integrates into the workflow of our journalists, but I don't think we're there yet," Keys said.

The Geofeedia service is still relatively new, becoming commercially available in May after a beta period. Geofeedia offers different prices for different kinds of uses, because some customers are looking for ongoing monitoring while others are more geared to searching. Monitoring plans are based on the number of locations covered, but also include an allowance for ad-hoc searches. Search-based plans are metered by the number of searches.

Geofeedia also is working on product improvements, such as an option for consolidated views of multiple locations. One early customer is a retailer who wants to monitor social media activity from many stores, according to Geofeedia, and the current edition of the product requires them to look at each location individually.

The Mount Rushmore heads travel to Kansas City.

Follow David F. Carr on Twitter @davidfcarr. The BrainYard is @thebyard and facebook.com/thebyard

Social media make the customer more powerful than ever. Here's how to listen and react. Also in the new, all-digital The Customer Really Comes First issue of The BrainYard: The right tools can help smooth over the rough edges in your social business architecture. (Free registration required.)