DISCLAIMER: This is NOT a magic get-rich quick technique or a surefire method for pinpointing 5, 10 or 100x ICOs... anyone that claims to have anything like that is a charlatan trying to exploit laziness: always do your due diligence - and by that I mean a good couple of hours of research 'graft' before you even think about investing your hard-earned cash. Alright? Well then on with the show.
So yes, the below is just ONE of many different approaches I like to take when I'm doing my due diligence on prospective ICOs (which includes, obviously, reading the whitepaper, checking out the team, their previous projects, their network, the net worth of the industry, looking at the use case, yada yada yada...). However, I do think this is a useful means of measuring the 'hype' and buzz surrounding an upcoming project, which I think can - loosely - be taken as an indicator of how many people are going to be excited about participating, and potentially, getting hold of the token on exchanges etc. down the line (although it could also just indicate that they are running a MASSIVE bounty campaign, which is not always a good thing). The useful thing here is that you get a quantitative result, which can be useful when making cross-project comparisons... so if you are very torn between investing in two different opportunities, something like this could help tip the scale.
OK, so first things first we're going to be using a free tool called Social Mention to get our social media 'read'.
Step 1
Go to www.socialmention.com and type the project name into the search box.
Step 2
Making sense of your results:
You're going to see an overwhelming amount of information on the next screen, and links to various mentions: however, what we're interested is the quadrant in the top left:
WePower, being the cool and worthwhile project that it is ;D, has some nice scores here. To give you a basic outline of what the various metrics mean:
Strength - aka overall Social Media strength, the basic metric of the likelihood the brand is being talked about on social media (this read is taken over the last 24 hours). You basically want this to be as high as possible for a project you want to invest in.
Sentiment - this is the supporter to detractor ratio - how many positive posts vs how many negative posts. It's all well and good if a project is being talked about all over Twitter etc., but if it's all complaints and FOMO then it's worse than useless. In this instance, you want the first number to be as high as possible, and the second to be as low as possible. In WePower's case the ratio's off the charts, 85 positive posts to 0 negative, which is a good sign.
Passion - This is a read of how likely people who post about the brand/project will do so repeatedly - could also be seen as a read on loyalty or retention. Do people really get behind this project and believe in it? A high score here is also what you want.
Reach - Read on the range of influence - how many unique individuals are talking about the project. Again a high score is what we want.
[b]Here are the scores from a somewhat less 'buzzing' ICO for comparison:[/b]
Step 3
So really, what we get here is a quick health-check or snapshot of how the ICO has been performing on social media over the last 24 hours. To make deeper comparisons we need to (A) break the data out and process it in something like Excel (B) and average reads over time. However, that goes beyond the scope of this little article. However, if you want to break the data out you need to click "CSV/Excel File" on the right hand task bar:
Eh voila, the data's yours to process as you want. As an example here's a snapshot of what I do with it (I also incorporate review scores):
I hope you find this useful are just ONE MORE technique you can employ when doing your due diligence on projects.