So, it’s sad, but kind’a comical too to see how quickly the everyday use of the web for communication is eroding everyone’s grammar and syntax (cough, Twitter). What’s truly tragic, however, is the frigg’n pandemic spread of companies promising machine based linguistic and sentiment analysis services, all of them knowing oh too well that the web has damn-near its own dialect now, be it acronyms (FTW!), abbreviations (RT) or any number of adhoc classifications (#[hashtag]), and maybe more importantly, a growing appetite for unspoken gestures of expression and opinion (be it thumbs, stars, likes, or otherwise), yet, for whatever reason, these companies continue to over-promise mountains of insight and perspective into “how your customers think and feel,” based only on what a bot and an algorithm spits back!? I don’t know, it’s just, uh, flawed. Update: check out Microsyntax.org, this entire organization is diving into the ‘new’ unconventions of communication on the web.
Updates from April, 2009
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Machine-Based Sentiment Analysis is Flawed
mike manuel
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Dear Social Media Monitoring Companies…
mike manuel
Here’s the problem, guys: when it comes to large-scale *online response* programs, too many of you are trying to shoehorn people into systems that don’t gel with the variety of workflows that are naturally found when, you know, silly humans get involved. Some people will dig your bookmarklet, others your dashboard, and still some your email alerts and feeds, but none of them will like *all* of these things, and I can guarantee you all of them will use more than one — so yeah, that makes your job very, very difficult. And your products, well, either loved or hated.
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How to Create a Social Media Monitoring Strategy
admin
So I was talking with a peer recently about his online community work, and in that conversation I asked him what his company’s social media monitoring and response strategy entailed. His reply:
“Oh, you know, we’re using Radian6….”
Frankly, his reply didn’t surprise me. Radian6 *is* a kick-butt service that a lot of companies are using, ours included, however, the more I think about his response and continue talking with other folks about conversation discovery, tracking, analysis, and the like, the more gaps I find….
And, well, the more it seems that very few companies actually have a fully baked social media monitoring and “engagement” strategy.
I think part of the problem is that for too long now, too many companies, like my colleague’s above, have just wanted to get their arms around the conversation discovery challenge, and things like analyzing, acting, and archiving those conversations were secondary concerns. And, you know, that’s fair enough, but by no means is that a complete plan.
It’s with this in mind, that I thought it might be interesting to outline, at a really basic level, what a social media monitoring and engagement program looks like in its entirety (if you take a sec and extend it past the obvious tasks). And note, I’m looking at this more from a general internal infrastructure perspective, so yeah, beware, your mileage may vary.