Marketing experts are telling Toyota that it needs to rebuild the trust of women in the wake of the recall mayhem. Social-media listening can play a critical role in campaign design, helping to fill in the gaps left by traditional methods.

The 2010 Winter Olympics have become a laboratory for how events and advertising play on the second screen. Most of the “experiments,” the way we interpret social media data, are focused on how consumers behave in social media. But what we can learn from 300 million people interacting online should inform all aspects of marketing.

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).

Reactions to the 2010 Super Bowl ads were reported early and often: The tally of mad, mid-game tweets let us know what the digital mavens were thinking. But what about the rest of the country? The folks who prefer to enjoy their social media on work computers in the days after?

The nimble behemoth lumbers forward. It is only a matter of time before Google owns the brand-monitoring space. Radian6, Scout Labs, Techrigy, are probably looking over their shoulders as they compete for business among the PR firms scrambling to keep tabs on the social web.
Google introduced Alerts in 2004 and became the first true technology solution [...]

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 [...]