If you want to monitor social media networks, there’s a wealth of free tools out there to tell you how many people are using what #tags on Twitter when and such like but one issue that UK application developers have yet to solve is how we, as British web people, filter out traffic and chatter from elsewhere.

Monitoring matters!

I’ve been doing some social media mapping on swine flu – trying to gauge the public’s mood – to foretell whether they are about to rush to the supermarket en masse, stock up on tinned beans and hibernate or whether they’re still going out, getting drunk, sharing saliva with strangers and comprehensively ignoring government hygiene advice. Such information helps organisations like the Department of Health target messaging effectively.

Following the trend

So yesterday I watched as ’swine flu’ loitered in the trending topics between the like of ‘Cristiano Ronaldo‘ and ‘Real Madrid’….I assumed that most of the English Ronaldo-related chatter would be from the UK, so the fact that swine flu, which is from everywhere, was not beating this in the trending topics led me to summarise that despite the WHO being on the brink of declaring a pandemic, the UK was more shocked at Real Madrid paying £80 million for that arrogant **** (I’m a Liverpool fan….)

If you want more detail though, searching for terms like ’swine flu’ amongst the daily din of chatter chucks up a diatribe of results from all over the English-speaking world. There’s the occasional ‘blimey gosh’ or ‘wassup’ that helps indicate what nationality the tweeter is, but you’re doing a quick trawl on a dashboard like Netvibes there is no way you can check such info.

Advanced searching

Twitter’s advanced search enables you to search tweets from a radius of a specified location, however entering United Kingdom does not produce all the UK’s tweets  – users don’t tend to put ‘uk’ in their location, they usually just out their home town – great if you’re monitoring a campaign in a small local area, but not nationwide.

One way of overcoming this is to whack in somewhere smack in the middle of Britain, like Leicester, and extending to the radius to 500 miles (specify English text only!). But still, how many users actually specify their location?

I’ve found some great tools for monitoring trending topics like Tweetstats and Twirl which are certainly useful, but so far I’ve yet to find a UK-made tool which shows traffic from the UK.

And that’s just Twitter! As for Facebook, the Lexicon tool seems about as good as it gets, but still no geographical segmentation available.

I’d love to hear whether anyone has found a more effective way of doing this.

Perhaps things will change with the arrival of the UK-made Audioboo…and at least that has the benefit of accents!