Chaptur.com is a relatively new website that indexes social platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube and then categorizes relevant news topics as they occur. The website follows trends from across the globe and organizes them into streams. Users are able to type in a topic, a person or an event and find what people are saying about the subjects instantaneously worldwide. The site claims to be able to recognize news stories through social media platforms often before stories are picked up by national and international media outlets. The site was created specifically for news junkies or people who spend most of their time online looking up the newest and latest information. The company found that news broadcasts were often not streamed live nor did they include much feedback from locals. Thus Chaptur was created.
The main advantage
of the Chaptur site to a PR practitioner is its ability to monitor crisis
situation in real time. It is a free service that provides PR professionals
with an intimate window into national trends and widespread opinions. When you
search an event such as Hurricane Sandy, you will often run across multiple
sites that are showing the same clips or tagging the same articles over and
over again. This site will allow you to monitor what others are saying about
the situation. This helps to measure public opinion of the situation and take appropriate
steps to rectify the situation.
The main
disadvantage of the site is that there is no export data option. All monitoring
must be done in real time and information cannot be exported and saved from reference.
This site would be more beneficial to a not-for-profit company that cannot
afford to do significant social media monitoring. It would also be extremely
helpful in times where a crisis situation is taking place such as the recent
robberies that have taken place at the Salvation Army.
I personally think
that the technology is too new for my liking. I think they could work out the
kinks some more. Specifically I would like to see an option where you can limit
which countries the information is drawn from, what demographics represent the
people commenting and an option to export the data you find on the site.
All in all I wouldn’t
write off this website but I wouldn’t invest too much time using it either.
