Like or Dislike?: Five Tips for Analyzing Social Media Sentiment

As companies prepare to implement their new social media strategies for 2011, there’s an important metric that shouldn’t be overlooked. In addition to conversation volume, share of voice, level of engagement and monthly trends, is social media sentiment a part of your monitoring process? If not, this may be an important factor missing from your listening routine.

Included in one of the three areas in which Ogilvy 360° Digital Influence categorizes metrics as part of its Conversation Impact™ measurement model, sentiment can be one of the most valuable aspects of social media. Facebook, Twitter and blogs give anyone the power to dash off their opinions to friends, followers or readers; but more importantly, these comments leave a traceable mark online. If it’s posted on a public profile or page, companies have the ability to access these remarks and gain insight into how people feel about their brands and products. During a new product launch, brand transformation or a crisis, this kind of knowledge on consumer sentiment is essential.

There are several listening tools that offer the feature of sentiment analysis. Here are five tips to keep in mind:

• Be aware of accuracy: When pulling percentages of positive and negative mentions, the accuracy of different monitoring tools varies substantially. Human emotion can be difficult to read correctly by a computer program and may be thrown off by sarcasm or slang. Some tools are built to rank sentiment mathematically after being trained by the user. While these are capable of providing very accurate data, they will also come with a higher price tag. Simpler tools may not provide reliable statistics unless a user manually categorizes posts, but they can help to quickly (and more affordably) identify strong positive or negative verbatim about a brand. Examine your budget and priorities to determine what will best fit your brand’s needs.




• Think long-term: Statistics on sentiment about a topic will usually provide more insight over an extended period of time. Make the investment to track sentiment historically by purchasing archived data or committing to analyzing it on a monthly, weekly or even daily basis and comparing the results over time.
• Dig into the conversation: While numbers and percentages are important to gauge people’s responses to a brand, campaign or product, they’re not the only important factor. Make sure to spend time digging deeper into the results and examining what people are really saying, especially negatively. It’s important to understand not just the volume but also what specifically people are praising or criticizing online.
• Listening tools won’t cover everything: Each listening tool will offer different functionalities. Ones that do provide highly accurate sentiment data may not allow the same level of ease in pulling and exporting search results as others. In addition, mentions on LinkedIn are not accessible by listening tools as of now. LinkedIn is an important platform to monitor, especially for professional organizations, and requires manual analysis to get a sense of the conversation.
• Determine the actionable value: The larger meaning of sentiment analysis will be different for every brand. Organizations will need to determine what importance the information holds for them and how they will act upon it. Will pulling sentiment results on a frequent basis help your company efficiently respond to customer complaints online? Or will it help inform changes in a product line or campaign strategy?

Have a goal in mind and a plan prepared for how tracking sentiment will help your company improve. What value have you seen in analyzing sentiment?

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Twitter Opens Advertising Opps to the Masses

For quite a while now everyone and their brother has been lobbing the “when are you going to really monetize Twitter” bombs into the micro-blogging giant’s front yard. It’s a popular thing to do but as of late that cry has lost a little steam (in part due to having real business people like Dick Costolo at the helm) and the latest move by Twitter could put a dent in one of the Internet industry’s favorite pastimes for sure.

The Next Web first reported the new Twitter for Business section and reported

The new version of business.twitter.com will provide business owners with twitter success stores, ideas, tips, tools and resources. Some of the tools included are information on promoted products and tutorials one how to communicate with customers using mobile.

Twitter’s business tools range from basic tips “What is Twitter” to more in-depth information on analytics, case studies, API integration etc.

The main page looks like this and the big attention getter is on the right side, which might as well read “Give Us Your Wallet”

Twitter is no longer just giving advertising a try with a few select folks. Now it’s official that Twitter is really open for business. It’s kind of sad to watch the old “Twitter is cool but hasn’t made a red cent” days go away. Now we have to look at Twitter as a legitimate business. Now whether what they do is meaningful is whole other story.

Along with this new way to get into advertisers pocketbooks, Twitter has updated its Twitter 101 offering with a new presentation of its old material and additional updates.

It appears now that Twitter is moving into the next phase of its development. How well it will work remains to be seen. Does advertising on Twitter give advertisers the best bang for their buck? Will more advertising be a positive or negative influence on the overall experience? To listen to Jason Falls tell it to ReadWriteWeb you certainly get one possible side of the argument clearly.

“Selling trending topics is like gaming Digg,” Falls said.

“Twitter is inviting marketing money bags to completely ruin the organic nature of the tool. When I look at something like that, I tell clients, ‘They’re just whores for your money.’ It’s obvious they’re making Facebook-like errors to try and compensate for the fact they never had a business model in mind when they built this thing.”

Yikes.

It’s too early to tell anything at this point but it does appear as if 2011 will be the Year of Real Revenue Generation for Twitter. If it isn’t then how much longer will investors put up with the excuses / reasons for not making much to this point?

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Web 2.0: A Necessary Evil?

Every day we talk about the large number of people who are using not just social media but other Web 2.0 applications to manage and promote their business. Online project management sites, web mail, Google docs, and online chat are all becoming part of the working norm but not everyone is comfortable with where we’re headed. According to a new report commissioned by McAfee, more than 50% of the over 1,000 decision-makers surveyed said that Web 2.0 was a dark and scary place.

You could put their fear off to technophobic paranoia, but more than 6 out of 10 have already felt the burn of a security breach with losses averaging around $2 million.

Companies’ top four perceived threats from employee use of Web 2.0 are malicious software (35 percent), viruses (15 percent), overexposure of information (11 percent) and spyware (10 percent).

Most of those issues can be dealt with provided a company puts the proper technological safeguards in place (remember, the survey was commissioned by McAfee). The biggest concern is one that even the most robust anti-virus software can’t stop – the loose-lipped employee.

60% of the companies surveyed said they were worried about loss of reputation, clients or confidence due to inappropriate use of Web 2.0 tools. One third said that they had “unplanned investments related to work arounds related to social media in the workplace.” 14% said they were involved in litigation or were dealing with legal threats as a result of an employee disclosing something they shouldn’t.

In order to prevent a problem, 13% of the businesses said they block all Web 2.0 activity. 81% said they restrict usage of at least one tool and 25% said they monitor social media usage in the workplace. As fearful as they are, only one third of the respondents said they have a social media policy in place. This is not surprising, as most companies wouldn’t even know where to begin writing up such a policy given the fast-changing nature of the tools involved.

Even with all of the issues, most of the companies agreed that the use of Web 2.0 technology helped create new revenue streams and 40% said the tools boosted productivity. Thus, the necessary evil.

Instead of blocking and monitoring, companies need to get more proactive about the use of social media and online tools. Policies need to be put in place, not only for security reasons, but so that a consistent message is being delivered across all the channels. That being said, there’s simply no way to stop an angry employee from blasting the company’s business over Twitter or uploading photos of the CEO getting friendly at the Christmas party to Facebook. We have to understand that Web 2.0 tools are just that, tools. And like a hammer or saw, they can be used for good or evil because there’s a human being wielding it and not an emotionless robot. In other words, Twitter doesn’t embarrass people, people embarrass people but you can’t let that stop you from using every tool available to make your company a success.

The McAfee “Web 2.0: A Complex Balancing Act – The First Global Study on Web 2.0 Usage, Risks and Best Practices” report is available for download at: www.mcafee.com

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