analytics vs. the real world part 2: Social Mention

 Next up in the experiment with social media analysis tools is Social Mention, a wide-ranging tool that identifies where and how often your brand is mentioned in social media. Options let you choose which media to search, such as blogs, microblogs, video, etc.  I selected "All" and ran the search on my name "Janet Egan" with the quote marks.

My name is very common and there are at least two Janet Egans with stronger brand identity than mine: the fashion designer and the novelist. For that matter, there are a bunch of Janet Egans who go to my eye doctor, order things from Baker Books, or are listed in the local phone book. Therefore, I was expecting the designer and the novelist to be mentioned more than I am.

I was not expecting the first three mentions to be All My Children. Oddly, there is no Egan attached to the Janet in the All My Children videos. In fact, Egan doesn't even occur on the page where it is allegedly mentioned in two of the references. The quotation marks evidently don't limit the search to the exact phrase.

I tried it again from the Advanced Search page, specifying "this exact wording or phrase". Same results.

Some of the remaining results were relevant, some not.
Relevant:

• A bunch of references to a Janet Egan Frisard whose Navy father's remains had been found after 45 years.
• 4 references to the fashion designer
• 5 references to me
• 2 references to the novelist who wrote The Keep

Irrelevant:

• 3 references to Janet Jackson
• 1 reference to a French vampire
• 2 references to videos of Shakespeare plays that do mention either a Janet or an Egan but not both

All in all,  Social Mention didn't give me much more insight into my online brand than I already had. The only interesting insight is that neither the novelist nor the fashion designer are doing much better than I am at advancing the Janet Egan brand.