Predictive Alerts - Crisis Detection Use Case

Use our Predictive Alerts to get notified of potentially harmful stories or posts before they gain momentum.

For this example, we want to monitor Starbucks' brand.

1. Start by creating a search that monitors your brand's name. After selecting "Search" in the main navigation sidebar, you can simply enter your brand's name in the search bar directly to the right.

Either select the keyword from the dropdown menu, or simply type it and hit enter. Your search now includes the keyword "Starbucks."

Tip: While having one search that monitors your brand's name is wise, you may want to create a second search that includes your brand's name with certain keywords of interest. Example: (Starbucks OR "Howard Shcultz") AND ("contamination" OR "poisoning" OR "fraud"). Our search bar supports the AND, OR and NOT Boolean functions.

2. For your initial scan through articles, keep the time filter at 12 hours. You can always change this later on. No matter what you set here, it won't have an effect on your predictive alert.

3. Don't forget to save your search.

4. Now to set up the predictive alert. Select "Alerts" in the navigation sidebar on the left of the UI, and click "Create new alert" in the Alerts Centre.

5. Select your newly created search.

6. You have the option of 2 different types of main alerts: real-time and scheduled. Real-time alerts are further split into 3 types.

• Popular articles (or posts/tweets/videos, if you created a social search) will alert you to any trending stories in your search. This option was our former alert feature, and is now defaulted to medium sensitivity.
• Any articles will send you an alert any time a story that matches your search criteria is published.
• Custom threshold lets you determine at which threshold you would like to be notified. For crisis detection, this is the option we recommend.

7. Select "When an articles reaches a custom threshold" and leave the default threshold metric set to "Predicted Interactions."

8. You may already have an idea of how many social interactions you would like a story to reach before you're notified. If you don't have a specific number in mind, we recommend setting this to 500 interactions to start.

9. For your first alert, set a shorter time interval such as 3 or 6 hours. This will catch any stories that reach a high interaction count shortly after publication - These are stories that achieve high visibility quickly.

10. You can select whether you would like to have your alerts emailed to you, or sent via Slack (note: your organization must integrate with Spike's Slack functionality first in order to receive alerts via Slack).

11. Hit "Save" at the bottom of your alert settings page. You will be shown your newly created alert in the Alerts Centre, along with some useful information, like when your alert was last triggered. You can always revisit this page to edit or review your alerts.

12. We also recommend setting a second Predicted Interactions Alert for a longer time frame. This will capture "slow burn" stories that take longer to reach a certain interaction level, but are still important to monitor.

13. Repeat steps 4-11 to create a second alert, but set the time frame to either 12 or 24 hours this time. You can leave the interactions at 500 or choose any other number that makes sense for you. Save the alert.

Tip: You can create as many alerts as you would like on the same search.

You now have alerts that will notify you when we predict that interactions will surpass a threshold, freeing you from having to manually monitor.

Stay ahead of those potentially damaging stories by letting Spike's predictive Alerts feature notify you ahead of time.

Enjoy your newfound freedom!