Nov
2011
How accurate is accurate?
Author: Alan Long
Do you know how accurate your social media data is?
Social Media can be a noisy pastime, with all the self appointed media mavens the world over looking for their voice to be heard over what turns out to be a cacophony.
For a brand trying to understand what is being said about them and by whom – and whether those voices are authentic, informed or influential – is a difficult challenge.
The level of noise (i.e. irrelevant mentions), while varying from client to client, does cause concern for all when trying to identify key conversations and when measuring sentiment and volume of conversation around a set of keywords.
So my question is – would you trust and make decisions off data that is 60% accurate? How about if it was 70%?
Our experiences in working with a range of clients and looking at a variety of issues indicates that of the social mentions collected, even after substantial refinement and use of negative filtering, the noise can be as high as 30-40%.
So if you don’t manually filter these results to ensure they are directly related to your product, you are working with some dodgy data to say the least.
I would hazard a guess there are many agencies and brands today working with data that is too dirty to be of any real value or provide substantial insight.
While automated monitoring tools are great, they require human filter and review to ensure that the data is valid and relevant.
How accurate is your data?
Related posts:
One Response to “How accurate is accurate?”
Leave a Reply
Our experiences tell us the same ! Neither data quality nor e.g. sentiment analysis can be done by only using tools without any human intellectual power. People who believe or affirm that qualitiy monitoring can be done (only) automatically don´t know what they are talking about or don´t tell the truth or know that they don´t deliver best quality.