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Those engaging in social media monitoring already know pretty well that it's mostly a text-based affair. That's all fine and well until we consider just how many of our conversations involve non-text elements. We communicate with texts, with timely memes, video clips,  “demotivational” material, even with emojis. Now, a new partnership between Ditto and Digimind is allowing these non-text elements to be part of the monitoring as well as the conversation.

It's not just our random non-textual cues that brought such a partnership around; the growing use of Instagram and Pinterest, among others, are likewise prompting a need for non-text analysis, and with such tools, analysis of these broader social networks can take place. Images are also a major force in the more text-based social medias; the use of images across social networks means extra engagement, and represents some of the most popular content therein.

With around 3.2 billion photos published and shared daily, it's clear that the ability to incorporate these photos in analysis is vital. With Ditto built into Digimind's Digimind Social system, brands can now immediately identify a logo being used regardless of the context in which its used. Knowing more about a logo's use can directly relate to the user's perception of that brand, and even provide some actionable insight about how the brand is perceived.

Digimind CEO Paul Vivant commented “80 percent of pictures, including brand logos do not mention the brand in the associated text. Brands that do not take this data into account through competitive intelligence and social media analysis miss out on significant amounts of information.”

Visuals help improve the impact of conversation. That old saying about a picture being worth a thousand words wasn't coined for no reason; think of all the times we've responded in a message thread or an instant messenger system or the like with a video. Maybe we've sent a picture of Captain Picard mid-facepalm to answer to some less-than-witty comment, or maybe we've taken a music video from YouTube (News - Alert) to respond to an article or the like. Regardless of the purpose, non-text cues are a part of everyday conversation, and by not incorporating these into social media monitoring, we're losing a big part of the conversation. We're only hearing maybe one word in three, and that can lead to some very big misunderstandings.

The Ditto / Digimind partnership may well be the start of a major new development in social media marketing, and in the end, give us a whole new way to look at this still-unfamiliar marketing venue.