Dataminr Pulse vs. General Sentiment (discontinued)

For any news editor, Dataminr is a must. It is the only platform I have used which I would 100 percent recommend to anyone who needs constant access and notification to all that is going on in the world's media. Various other platforms provide information, but Dataminr collates all these other platforms together into one easy to use interface. It is remarkably quick to check Dataminr after receiving a desktop or email notification and find out what is going on regarding a specific subject. As a news editor, I am required to manage a news team that produces copy for breaking stories, and Dataminr allows me to find news and commission it faster than any other platform I have previously used.

Incentivized

Determine what your research question or customer relations needs are to pick a tool that is a good match.

• Collating various sources into one interface makes keeping track of breaking news remarkably easy.
• The live update feature means updates from breaking stories are fed directly to the consumer. This means users do not have to go out their way to find out every last detail of a story, and can instead use their time writing the story.

Incentivized

• Using volume and association metrics to assess and predict trends and emerging topics
• Use the articles metric to drill down into specific posts, such as tweets, Facebook, blog comments, news articles
• General Sentiment has the ability to access password protected sites to access information that may not normally show up in standard internet searches

• Setting up Dataminr can be relatively obtuse. Although basic functions are easy to use, the more in-depth aspects require research and training to use correctly.
• Topics are very broad, which can be a negative at times. It would be useful to have 'football' as a topic rather than 'sport', for instance.

Incentivized

• The application does take time to start gathering data on a specific topic. As such, its important to include as many keyword search topics as possible, and also be sure to refine them as you gather data.
• The user interface isn't particularly intuitive, there is some work that could be done to streamline its use.

Social media tools are constantly evolving. I would want to be sure that my research question was complimented by the metrics and options presented by the social media tool. General Sentiment is very useful and innovative and their customer service was excellent. Their sales and customer service team was very helpful in onboarding our staff and being flexible with our needs.

Connection issues/downtime occur but they are rare and generally quickly fixed. There are frequent seminars and tutorials to teach the platform. This is an excellent decision from the company and has made me more willing to learn how to use Dataminr correctly. As a result of this, I use the platform more than I would have if I had been forced to learn everything myself.

Incentivized

Before using Dataminr we did not use a similar platform, with stories discovered by simply crawling the web (TweetDeck/Reddit/news sites, etc). Because of this, Dataminr has been a game-changer for us and has revolutionized the way we have worked since it was introduced. Being able to completely remove one aspect of the job (searching for news) has increased productivity in all other areas.

Incentivized

• Since starting to use Dataminr, our traffic has vastly increased. Though not entirely to thank for the growth, Dataminr has played a role in talkSPORT.com's ComScore increasing by 150 percent over the past 18 months.
• Increased traffic is partly due to producing more content, and Dataminr has directly led to discovering a number of stories we previously would have missed.

Incentivized

• Social media analytics can accelerate the speed with which researchers can investigate a topic of interest, at a lower cost.
• Due to the low barrier to entry (e.g., most social media sites and blogs are free), data collection burden, as traditionally defined, is significantly reduced or eliminated. The absence of direct interactions between researchers and the study population may do more to mitigate sources of bias compared to other more intrusive forms of data collection (i.e., interviews, focus groups).
• Used to to gather unstructured data and feedback from Medicare beneficiaries, caregivers, advocates, and other stakeholders to identify systemic issues that beneficiaries encounter.