What is an Alert?
Alerts are emails sent to users either on a pre-set scheduled basis, in real-time or when an exceptional event occurs. Synthesio labels these Alerts as Scheduled Alerts, Real-time Alerts and Volume Alerts.
Difference between an Alert and a Shared Report?
Before you get started with Alerts, one thing to note is that Alerts are quick notifications about changes in your dataset that are based on a set of rules you provide during the set up. If you are looking to have graphs, charts, & statistical answers sent to you, you should choose ‘Share a Report,’ which is located in the same part of the interface.
How do I create an Alert?
To set up Alerts, click on 'Share' & choose whether you would like to share a ‘Report’ or an ‘Alert.’
Information Section
The Information Section lets you title each alert and customize the list of recipients within your organization. Email addresses are required to activate alerts.
How to Customize your Alerts
Before you get started with creating your Alerts, here’s a few rules of thumb for choosing the right alert for your organization.
If you want information about chronological order, use the date; if you value media types, you can sort/group by mention type, & you can categorize by sentiment if you are interested in only content that is a specific content type.
You can choose from a ‘Detailed Alert’ or a ‘Summarized Alert.’
A ‘Detailed Alert’ gives you longer summaries of some of the aspects in your dashboard you are tracking and will send you a long form email with images & more, whereas ‘summarized’ alerts are broad summaries of what happened to your dataset that you can then open up into your dashboard.
Define layout of Email
Defining what your email sends to you is the second most important step to getting specific notifications on new updates to your dataset.
You can categorize mentions by Topics, Subtopics, or by Date.
Grouping your mentions is another important next step if you are looking to look at ‘sentiment,’ ‘media type,’ or ‘date.’
Let’s say you are tracking sentiment overtime about one of your subtopics. You can choose that in this setting and send to your team members the updates at the given time you choose.
Schedule your Alerts
Customize your delivery options by choosing clock format, time zone, and your country’s standardized ‘first day of the week.’ Hover over a day of the week and then click on the ‘+’ to set a time for alert delivery & set your time zone so you can receive more timely results.
Email alerts generated for data-sets with no new mentions will contain a simple line of text explaining the absence of data in the alert. You can choose between three alert types: schedule, volume, & real-time.
Scheduled alerts will be based on time & time of day you set up. Volume will have three options & based on the percentage of alerts being sent out. Real-time will show you new alerts whenever they populate in the dashboard.
Synthesio will pre-fill the Alert subject line for you.
Choose the Volume your Alerts (Velocity) Send
Volume alerts allow you to choose bench-marked thresholds that will trigger alert delivery. Each level compares the ‘present’ data set with data from 7 days prior. The different levels each have ’intensity’ sliders which allow you to choose the volume percentage increase that triggers the alert. Each level looks at progressively shorter time frames to generate data comparisons. Changing the ‘spike option’ allows you to determine how often the alerting system checks the data-set for new mentions. This is important if there are frequent fluctuations that generate a large volume of email alerts. Changing the ping rate will decrease the frequency with which alerts are sent.
Volume-based Alert
Real-time alerts allow you to receive an email when a new mention is posted in your dashboard.
Keep in mind: Real-time alerts can generate a large volume of emails if your data-set produces a lot of mentions. These alerts are best deployed on highly filtered data-sets with a specific goal in mind. You can schedule for a specific volume to send out every 5, 10, 30, & 60 minutes.
For example, you might want to be alerted each time a user from a target demographic mentions a specific brand. Or you might want to know when powerful influencers post videos to YouTube.
The Synthesio team can help you determine the most optimal use cases to deploy Real-Time alerts, so you receive true value out of the communications sent from the alerting system.
Alert Filters
Filters for alerts operate in the same manner as dashboard or widget filters. Simply choose the parameters you’d like to limit your data-set to and click apply.
These parameters will drive the data collected by the alerting system.
The Filter Counter visualizes the total amount of data filters you’ve applied to the alerting data set.
The Alerts system is now compatible with advanced filters such as search query filters, classifier tags, text analytics, author, noise reducer, reviewed mentions, favorite filters, entities, classifiers, publisher lists, so you can keep track of specific influencers in your industry.
Alert Templates
There are two different email templates that you can choose for your alerts - 'Alerting' and 'Notification'.
The 'Alerting' template will send an email that focuses on qualitative data and is appropriate to maintain a vigilant eye on your brand mentions if you don't log into the platform daily.
The 'Notification' template sends a simple text email with a summation of the total volume of brand mentions in the data-set. This is most appropriate for tracking keywords that are sensitive to your brand and enables you to receive updates whenever a trigger keyword is used.
How should my team use Alerts?
Alerts is the gateway to making any long-term report or classifier you track over time.
This feature is just the beginning to tackle your primary concerns over brand health, brand tracking, competitive tracking, and more!
As a next step, we suggest turning it into a classifier so that you can auto-populate new mentions. From there, you can create a widget in your Reports that will show how this has developed or changed overtime!