Detect PR Crises Early On with Mentionlytics’ New AI Anomaly Detection Alerts

If you have been working in PR or social media for a hot minute, you know a single misstep can trigger a public backlash. The Internet is all fun and games until a minor issue turns into a reputation wildfire overnight.

There isn’t much you can do about it — or is there?

Well, now you can put out the fire as soon as it’s just a little flame with Mentionlytics’ New AI Anomaly Detection Alerts: Highly targeted and customizable email notifications by SIA, alerting you when something has started to make waves!

Catching PR crises before they get out of hand is time-critical.

So, our new Anomaly Detection Alerts are designed to notify you when SIA (our AI Social Intelligence Advisor) recognizes any abnormal behavior in your mentions’ volume.

We’re not talking about just when there are sudden spikes (SIA already notifies you about that), since sometimes that can be normal for some accounts.

We talk about real deviations from the norm. The new system spots when something breaks the pattern. Sudden? Gradual? Doesn’t matter. If it’s unusual, you’ll know.

These new alerts provide you with:

• A chart clearly representing (with a red dot) the moment when the mentions’ volume started increasing past the usual (expected) situation.
• An AI Summary of the most critical topic driving the anomaly.

However, the best part is that you can fully customize your AI Anomaly Detection Alerts to notify you not only for your brand mentions but also for other important keywords (e.g., your campaign hashtags or even competitors).

And of course, you can snooze the notifications, in case it’s nothing critical to keep up with.

This combination of targeted and highly accurate alerts lets you respond quickly and effectively to emerging issues to keep PR crises at bay.

Let’s explain how these alerts work and how to take full advantage.

Beyond Simple Spikes: Understanding Normal Behavior

So far, you’ve been receiving SIA alerts for sudden spikes in the mentions volume of your brand monitoring keywords.

Example of SIA alert for sudden spikes in mentions’ volume.

For established brands with high social media activity, a surge in mentions might be perfectly normal. People talk a lot about famous brands.

Take Ryanair, for example. They consistently receive a lot of mentions hourly. A simple spike alert wouldn’t differentiate between typical activity and a genuine crisis.

But now SIA’s AI understands the normal behavior of each account and keyword you monitor.

This means SIA can recognize the typical mention volume and fluctuation patterns, enabling it to identify truly significant deviations that need your attention.

Let’s take the example of Ryanair a step further.

Spike Detection

On a typical Tuesday, Ryanair might get around 100-200 mentions per hour, discussing flight deals, customer experiences, or general travel chatter.

If there’s a sudden jump to 500 mentions in an hour, SIA will send a spike alert to the Ryanair team.

However, this sudden increase might be due to a popular travel blogger posting about a Ryanair flight. But if Ryanair collaborates monthly with travel bloggers, that can be a normal spike during the month.

Taking it a step further with AI Anomaly Detection

SIA has learned that Ryanair’s typical mention pattern includes fluctuations within the 100-200 range, with occasional spikes due to promotions or viral content.

Now, let’s say on a random Tuesday, a flight from London to Dublin is unexpectedly delayed, causing significant passenger frustration.

Ryanair’s mentions surge to 1,500 that Tuesday (which is a lot more than expected for a typical Tuesday), with a significant increase in negative sentiment.

SIA recognizes this as a major deviation from Ryanair’s normal behavior, far beyond typical fluctuations.

The Ryanair team receives an AI Anomaly Detection Alert highlighting the deviation from the norm, the negative sentiment, and the likely cause (the delayed flight). Then they can quickly react, releasing a statement and working to mitigate the situation.

So, now let’s see how you can customize your AI Anomaly Detection Alerts to protect your reputation to the maximum!

Best Part: Customize Your AI Anomaly Detection Alerts

There are a lot of options to customize your alerts for highly targeted notifications.

For example, do you want to be notified only when there’s an abnormal increase in negative mentions related to a particular campaign?

You can do that by selecting to receive alerts for a specific tracker or even keyword, and only for negative mentions!

This approach ensures minimum noise in your inbox, letting you focus on what truly matters.

Let’s explore more options.

Select Which Trackers You Receive Alerts For

SIA can now tell when there are deviations in the volume of mentions, not only for brand monitoring trackers but also for competitors and other keywords.

All you have to do is select the keywords or whole trackers you want to receive alerts for, and SIA will keep you up to date with Anomaly Detection Alerts for them, too.

Set Up AI Summary Language

Our AI algorithms now translate the most important topics making waves in your mentions into any language you want — making sure you understand everything at a glance!

Choose Who Receives Anomaly Detection Alerts

You can now choose who is being notified when something happens: you, your team and colleagues, or even your clients!

Simply add their email addresses to “Send To” if they are Mentionlytics users. Otherwise, type their address in the CC or BCC section.

You can even assign different recipients for various alerts. For example, user 1 receives alerts for X (Twitter) unusual behavior, while user 2 gets alerts for the “delayed flight” keyword across all channels.

Apply More Alert Filters

Now, customization options don’t stop at recipients or trackers.

Channels

You can select which channels you want to receive alerts for. That’s really useful when you monitor campaigns or crises in specific channels.

For the example above, we’ve chosen Twitter (X) only.

Frequency, Sentiment & Threshold

What’s more, you can set minimum hours between alerts to avoid getting an overwhelming amount of notifications in the event of an ongoing crisis or a viral moment.

As we already said, you can select to receive alerts only for negative sentiment to keep these alerts only for PR crisis management purposes.

You can manually set the threshold of the alert to whatever number of mentions per hour you think SIA should alert you.