Aug
2011
Is sentiment just a soft metric?
Author: Alan Long
In Lucio’s last article he touched on the broad range of applications of social media monitoring data. This week I’ve decided to look at the top line sentiment data and provide a few reasons as to why it can be an important and valid within your social media monitoring efforts.
Benchmark:
It provides a reference point at a specific time. Online1984 delivers an actual numeric score based on a number of factors including individual influence, environmental impact and the intensity of the feeling. While the automated tools provide a positive / negative / neutral view of the brand, the measurement needs to be more robust.
Competitive:
Using the sentiment score of your own product / brand / company and comparing it with your competitors will enable you the ability to track the trends and to better understand your competitive standing. The score can also show things that influence and impact each businesses sentiment.
Gain further insight by taking this data and mashing it with others such as sales, search volumes, fuel prices etc and look for correlations. From this comes learning’s of when a certain set of circumstances occur, the likely outcome will be X. This allows a reasoned approach, a response versus an ill-conceived reaction and the start of a more sophisticated risk mitigation strategy.
Senior Management:
A numerical sentiment score is easy and quick way for senior management to get a top line understanding of what is going on with a particular brand. Outlining changes in daily sentiment scores and the underlying events leads to greater understanding of the impact of your companies advertising and marketing efforts.
Sales:
This may be the over-riding reason for understanding the sentiment towards your brand. Have you ever bought a product from a brand you didn’t like, your answer may be yes, but more likely it’s no.
We gravitate towards brands that reflect our view of the world or how we wish to be seen. If you’ve bought something from a company you didn’t like or had a negative perception of, you must have had very little choice.
It is obvious that if there is a positive perception of your business and products & services, there will be less obstructions to purchase.
For some companies the sentiment will be perceived just as an available metric or even a soft piece of information, but if the right question is being asked that is relevant to the communications strategy being implemented then it can be a powerful and insightful key performance indicator.
But like all data and information that is presented, it is the correlation, the application of context and expertise, including competitive information, marketing activity, economic and political influences that give real meaning to the measurement.
Having the data is just not enough anymore.
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