In any PR activity we need to measure results, and this raised new challenges when social media came on the scene.

Many measurement and analytics experts jumped on the bandwagon to offer tools that help brands ‘measure online influence’ via these social media platforms.  Last week Hootsuite announced its new analytics solution which moves away from being just a simple social media dashboard and into a versatile online brand management service. In my eyes, this move by Hootsuite can be seen as both clever and brave. Clever, as social media measurement is a very hot topic and everyone is looking for those tools to give their social media activity ‘meaning’. Brave, as this is an incredibly competitive space and thus far, I do not believe one solution has truly cracked it.

At Firefly we’re always open to new tools, that could complement our own FireTalk service, so we will certainly be giving Hootsuite a go.

This post was written by Charlotte.

“The political parties battling it out on the eve of the general election have missed an opportunity to woo voters through social media” begins an interesting articlethat caught my eye today.

Working with i-level, the real-time digital communications agency, we’ve been monitoring all the Buzz and Tweets from each of the main political parties on the hot issues affecting the election. Far from ignoring its online audiences, Cameron, Brown, Clegg (or rather no doubt their digitally savvy aides) have been hard at work responding to the trending topics online. Using Google Buzz to monitor news, blogs, forums, Twitter and rest of the social media landscape, i-level has produced a nifty graph to show how the three main parties have been battling it out on a the key election issues – Economy, Taxes and Education.

This graphic isn’t a representation of popularity or effectiveness of communication. However, what it does is demonstrate that the parties have been actively engaged online and responding to hot buzz topics – with Cameron coming out on top! Watch this  space to see if the victorious party can keep it up post-election…