The Oscars are one brand that still controls its equity from the top down: Winners are chosen by the Academy. But outside of the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood, winners are decided by thousands of movie buffs posting their opinions online.

Most of the effective algorithms for measuring sentiment rely on fairly well formatted, “predictable” text that follows formal grammar rules. But formal writing carries a bias. It is an immensely more difficult task to harvest information from the drips-and-drabs of informal writing such as is found in twitter and forums (or even blogs).

In the social-media analytics space, there is much discussion about  accuracy. Unfortunately, it is rarely defined and there is never a discussion about what is accurate enough.  Of course we want accuracy in everything we do.  Just saying we need accuracy is like saying we need cheap energy.
Obviously cheap energy is highly desirable and there are [...]

I credit Malcolm Bastien for inspiring the headline who says in a recent blog post: “Just like the enemy of web analytics is measurement of page views and visitors, the enemy of social media listening is listening only for brand mentions.”
Such a great point. Counting brand mentions is only the tip of the iceberg yet [...]

“If you can’t measure it, you can’t change it “. This is one of those fundamentals that is so often forgotten at many levels of an organization. Every effort made by an organization to change something has behind it an implicit measurement, a representation in the mind of someone with some quality that may differ [...]

The fine folks at www.research-live.com recently posted an email debate titled “Tracking online word-of-mouth: The people vs machines debate.” This debate featured Mike Daniels of Report International arguing the pro-human side and Mark Westaby of Metrica arguing the pro-machine side.
This is a great debate and is definitely worth checking out, along with Nathan Gilliatt’s response. [...]