Last night I got a particularly hamfisted pitch on Twitter for an automated sentiment tracking service. Apparently, they picked up that I had mentioned a brand, and sent an unsolicited reply that gave me the number of positive and negative mentions of that brand online along with a link to click for more information.
Many of the leading social media monitoring suites come with some form of sentiment analysis technology, and this technology is used for a number of applications to track buzz, or measure crisis management, or the gauge the efficacy of a campaign. I've hinted here in the past that I remain unsure about what to do with sentiment analysis, which has of course prompted a number of folks in the space to drop by and comment, for which I am grateful. I do, however, want to elaborate on my "discomfort" about automated sentiment analysis here, because it is something to which I've given a fair amount of thought, and it deserves an equally fair shake here.
A few days ago I posted my thoughts on social media monitoring for market research.One thing that has become apparent to me over the past few months is that there are a lot of folks using social media monitoring tools to listen for brand mentions, but truly they are capable of so much more with a little forethought and planning. Jason Falls recently posted a survey to determine exactly how people are using these tools (take it!) while others seem to be questioning how the tools are used or constructed. One thing is for sure, however--social media monitoring for brand mentions is not a substitute for research. The mere fact that people are talking about your brand means little unless you can really be sure of the context of those conversations, and equally importantly, who isn't talking about your brand and why.
So, you've taken the big first step in social media for your business: listening. You've set up Google Alerts for your brand, done some Twitter searches, and maybe even signed up for some heavy duty monitoring services from the likes of Radian6, Trackur or Tweetfeel. Sentiment analysis is far from perfect, but on a pretty good day, it will give you a pretty good idea of the consumer zeitgeist out there for your products and services. So, let's stipulate that you are listening, you can measure the conversations, and you have a pretty good idea whether or not those conversations are trending positively or negatively towards your brand.
There are lots of ways to measure the effectiveness of social media campaign, but only one right way to start. Before you start a Facebook Fan Page, or open a corporate Twitter account, the one mandatory step you need to take to be sure any of it is worth your time is to identify the key performance indicators (KPIs) of your business, and measure them first. You might use the data, you might not--but if at any point down the road you need to measure exactly how much social media engagement has added to your bottom line, you'll want to know exactly where you were when you started. A small additional expense, perhaps, but you'll thank me later, trust me.