Glossary

Content aggregation, online media monitoring, near-real-time, tagging, customer sentiment, reputation management, business intelligence…

…These terms are used early and often in our industry. One company’s definition may not relate to another’s, or to your needs. To clarify, Moreover Technologies has developed a glossary of frequently used terms and proprietary offerings—with explanations of their applicability to our products and services.

Content aggregation (RSS aggregation)

The process of collecting posts, reports and feeds from the rapidly expanding universe of social media and online media sources. Moreover Technologies has reached an aggregation milestone of 750,000 social media reports and 500,000 news articles daily, for a monthly total of 42 million posts culled from 650,000 sources. More than 750,000 of these posts are gathered from relevant pre-screened “White List” social media sources, including blogs, podcasts, social video, photo sharing sites, microblogs, wikis, reviews, and forums. The global database from which the White List is derived stands at 12 million sources and counting. RSS aggregation refers to the portion of the process that pulls in feeds from relevant RSS sources.

Business intelligence

Compendium of online news and social media reports addressing a variety of client needs, including reputation management, image development, tracking of competitor movement, and other meaningful analyses of customer trends, preferences and sentiments. Collected current and critical marketplace feedback can be used for strategy development in such areas as branding, customer service, and new product/service introductions. Moreover Technologies’ aggregated content provides business intelligence about a wide range of business topics and issues.

Social media

According to Wikipedia, social media is information designed to be “disseminated through social interaction, created using highly accessible and scalable publishing techniques. Social media supports the human need for social interaction, using Internet- and web-based technologies to transform broadcast media monologues (one to many) into social media dialogues (many to many). It supports the democratization of knowledge and information, transforming people from content consumers into content producers.”

Social media links include blogs, podcasts, social video, photo sharing sites, microblogs, wikis, reviews, and forums. Moreover Technologies now offers extensive blog and podcast postings, along with content tracking through such microblog sites as Twitter and FriendFeed; video sharing via YouTube and other sites; forums including Neowin and DigitalSpy; consumer reviews through Amazon user reviews and the like; wikis encompassing Wikimedia Foundation sites; and photo sharing through Flickr and SmugMug, among others.

Media monitoring

The process of tracking and recording reports, posts, comments and other outward-bound communications from online media sources. As the lines continue to blur between “online media” (established, acknowledged media sources) and “social media” (featuring ever-more-influential bloggers and other grassroots authors/creators), these terms are increasingly applicable to the combined universe of online and social media.

Near-real-time

Refers to capture of feeds and reports within minutes or even seconds after broadcast/publication. When blogposts or website content is published, Moreover Technologies’ Weblogs.com ping server site is automatically notified. It then distributes the information to subscribers. Depending on connection speed and other technological factors, this can take seconds or minutes to occur.

Moreover Technologies

Founded in 1998, Moreover Technologies is one of the world’s largest near-real-time aggregators of business intelligence from both online news and social media sources. The firm serves such Fortune 500 clients as Shell Oil, as well as the world's leading media monitoring agencies.

Metabase

Moreover Technologies’ proprietary repository is a metabase containing millions of links to online news, social media posts, user linking and commentary—breaking, current and comprehensive. More than 750,000 social media reports are accessed through the Social Media Metabase and 500,000 news articles are collected daily from the News Metabase, for a monthly total of 42 million posts culled from more than 650,000 sources.

Newsdesk

Another Moreover Technologies proprietary offering, which delivers daily, near-real-time unified news and social media business intelligence customized to client specifications. Based on client parameters, Newsdesk monitors online and social media, RSS feeds, corporate and government press, and marketing communications; assembles all this information into unified reports and posts; and publishes them through a single-portal technology. This collection, publication and delivery system provides subscribers convenient, efficient review, rapid re-distribution through their intranet or email alerts, and creation of robust HTML newsletters.

Newsdesk utilizes Moreover Technologies’ combined News and Social Media Metabase repositories, which include 1.4 million-plus news and social media reports daily from more than 650,000 sources covering more than 100 countries and 50 languages. This service keeps clients current on everything needed to maximize business intelligence, media monitoring and corporate marketing.

Ping/Ping Server Site

Essentially, it acts as a central hub between publishers and consumers of content. Publishers notify the community at-large when new content is posted, so that large-scale consumers of content (such as search engines) don’t have to guess or blindly poll sites to check for new material. By creating a more efficient interchange between the two sides, content can be indexed and distributed more quickly, as close to real-time as possible. Wikipedia mentions Weblogs.com as one example of a ping server.

Search Engine Toolkit

Search Engine Toolkit is a Moreover Technologies product that allows clients to customize Metabase searches using sophisticated search engine Application Programming Interface (API) technology.

Weblogs.com

Weblogs.com is a ping server run by Moreover Technologies that automatically notifies subscribers when new content is posted to a website or blog. Weblogs.com is the original ping service on the web and receives more than 4 million pings every day from blogs, news and other information sources that have configured their publishing software to notify Weblogs.com the moment new content is published. Many of the large blog publishing platforms automatically ping Weblogs.com on behalf of their users.

Vertical Intelligence

Content collection that drills down into specific industries and interests, countries, and languages. Moreover Technologies offers in-depth vertical search options tied to 800 industries, 100-plus countries and 50 languages. Among indexed categories are more than 5,200 medical and health sources, 5,100 financial sources, 5,200 technology sources, 4,000 government and political sources, 1,000 energy sector sources, 1,300 science sources, and about 10,000 sports sources.

Indexing (ties to: categorization, tags, tagging)

The process of categorizing, organizing and identifying information using a variety of criteria “tags.” Moreover Technologies offers unparalleled categorization via a non-RSS-based harvesting technology with our Metabase XML, incorporating both semantic and geodata criteria. Metadata categorization tags include 30 search options such as feed rank, feed order, outbound links, feed categories, feed language, categories, stocktickers, generator and publishing platform.

Customer sentiment

Refers to what the marketplace is thinking, now available at a very granular level because of the ability to identify individual comments, responses and concerns. Increasingly, companies are gauging customer sentiment when crafting future marketing and sales strategies, assessing present offerings, and addressing problem areas.

Reputation management

The strategy and tactical deployment of a process for monitoring and responding to reports related to a company, industry or organization. The process enables an entity to assess what’s being said about it in the online news and social media worlds, determine appropriate reaction stance and positioning related to reports propagated about it, and conduct proactive outreach to influence/impact the relevant marketplace.

Buzz marketing (also: viral marketing)

With the rapid rise of blogs and other types of social media, buzz marketing has become synonymous in many circles to viral marketing. Viral marketing is defined by Wikipedia as: “Marketing techniques that use pre-existing social networks to produce increases in brand awareness or to achieve other marketing objectives (such as product sales) through self-replicating viral processes, analogous to the spread of pathological and computer viruses. It can be word-of-mouth delivered or enhanced by the network effects of the Internet.”

Workflow integration

Enterprise-wide, direct distribution of data. With Moreover Technologies, a company can provide a fully tailored news/social media service directly through its intranet. Moreover Technologies also facilitates scheduled distribution of collected business intelligence across the enterprise using professional email alerts/media monitoring news updates and customizable HTML newsletters.