Telligent Analytics empowers customers to discover and monitor key topics and sentiment as they are discussed in their Telligent-powered communities built on the Telligent Evolution platform. The application also provides a method for monitoring desired terms in off-site discussions. This off-site monitoring is accomplished with external buzz (which, internally, is also called third-party buzz or social media buzz). The tool was introduced in Telligent Analytics 3.0.
What does external buzz do?
The external buzz service monitors selected sites for mentions of keywords tracked through the administrator's Sentiment / Buzz Keywords list on the site. When external buzz finds a new piece of content including one of the tracked keywords, it grabs the content; analyzes it for sentiment, and stores it in the Telligent Analytics database.
How external buzz works
External buzz does not prowl the Internet, per se; it is not a spider. In the most commonplace sense, it leverages RSS. If a site/service supports search results being returned as an RSS feed, that site/service can be added as a data source for external buzz.
Out of the box, Telligent Analytics pulls from sites such as:
- Twitter
- Friendfeed
- NewsVine
- Yahoo News
- Bloglines
- Technorati
- YouTube
The RssFeedImport task loops through the tracked keywords list and then performs requests on each of the source URLs using the individual keywords, basically performing a search on each given site. The task retrieves the results and saves any new results to the database.
The previous example is a simplistic one, but it illustrates the basic ideas. External buzz also has specialized tasks that support pulling images from Flickr; images from Live Search, and videos from Live Search using those services' APIs. Additionally, Telligent Analytics supports building custom external buzz importers.
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