Sentiment Analysis an Important Factor in Social Media Analytics
By using Social Media your organization is able to learn what your customer truly thinks about you, your products and your services. A key component to your Social Media Analytics program should include understanding the point of view of the author of the post. You need to analyze whether the post is positive or negative.
Determining? whether the opinion of a post is not easy, but technologies such as Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics and Text Mining have made it a little easier. These technologies take care of the heavy lifting, making your Social Media Analytics process a little less consuming. It can be a consuming process.
Natural Language Processing (NLP) software endeavors to understand groupings of words to determine their meaning. In the case of Social Media Analytics, NLP tries to understand the sentiment of the word groups and rate them as either positive or negative. The problem comes in with understanding and ambiguity. Take for instance this simple example to help you understand one of the problems with NLP. Take the phrase The house is small. Is that a positive statement or a negative one? Well it all depends on the reader and what you are looking for. NLP is not perfect, yet but with a little manual work it can get you to where you need to be. Social Media Analysis will for some time be a semi-automated process because there are some things that software just can’t figure out.
Still, the ability to understand sentiments is an important factor. Understanding sentiments help towards understand ROI the of your Social Media initiatives. By setting a baseline of where your customer sentiments are today as collected through your Social Media Monitoring data-warehouse then over time watching how those sentiments improve can serve as a useful key performance indicator (KPI). Then you can tie the timing of the sentiment shift with sales for the same time period and now you have a measure that most executives will appreciate.
As you continue you Social Media Analytics process do not forget to collect and benchmark the sentiments of social web participants.
What is Social Media Analytics
Analytics as defined by Thomas H. Davenport is, “The extensive use of data, statistical and quantitative analysis, explanatory and predictive models, and fact based management [used] to drive decisions and actions.” This is a subset of Business Intelligence which refers to a set of skills, knowledge, technologies, applications, and practices combined to acquire understanding of the market behavior and business context.
Analytics involves several steps.
1. The collection of data
2. The integration of data
3. The analysis of data
4. The interpretation of data
5. The presentation of business information
Through the use if business intelligence you will be able to answer the following critical questions:
* What happened?
* How many, how often, where?
* Where exactly is the problem?
* What actions are needed?
* Why is this happening?
* What if these trends continue?
* What will happen next?
* What’s the best that can happen?
When it comes to social media here are some questions that need to be addressed from an analytics perspective:
- Standard Reports: What conversations are occurring?
- Ad hoc reports: When & Where are the conversation occurring?
- Query/drill down : What are the sentiment of the conversations?
- Alerts : What actions are needed?
- Statistical Analysis : Why are these conversation occurring?
- Forecasting/Extrapolation : What if these conversations continue?
- Predictive Modeling : What conversations are next?
- Optimization : How can we lead these conversations?
Where is your organization when it comes to Social Media Analytics?
ManoByte
Byte or get bitten!
Social Media Mining and Monitoring
Over 200 million people in the United States spend an average of 32 hours a week on the Internet. People now spend more time on the internet then they do reading newspapers, listening to radio, or watching TV. As of November 2008 there were over 150 million blogs with each week another 1.5 million blogs being posted. Add to that the ever-increasing social networking sites, message boards, online communities and unfathomable tweets. All of this means that consumers have an ever growing voice to talk about your brand.
Business critical communications are becoming part of the Social Web and without visibility into this media, organizations will fail to react and participate in this new environment. ManoByte is a Social Media Analytics company that tracks how people are talking about their brand, products and services across the social web. We monitor sentiments, attitudes, authority, and the magnitude of conversations that are taking place online.
With our social media mining services we help you gain real-time insight into the consumer opinions and perceptions of your company, your offerings, and your competitors that will help steer your future marketing strategies, messaging and overall business planning. ManoByte can help you:
- Find out public opinion on the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors
- Measure the effectiveness of a major marketing campaign
- Gain feedback on a recent product launch
- Measure demand for an upcoming products or services
- Spot consumer trends in your industry
- Identify your most powerful critics and evangelists
There are a lot of online conversations happening but very few companies who can help you monitor, understand, and leverage what is taking place across the Social Web. ManoByte is one of those few companies that can help.
Byte or get bitten!
Company Buzz on Linked In
Recently LinkedIn has added some additional capabilities to its application. It is added ???Company Buzz??? which monitors what people are saying about you on Twitter. This is a great tool and provides you with basic trending data.
You add it directly to your profile and it displays the results. It is also customizable allowing you to add whatever key terms you want to monitor.
I would rate this tool up there with google alerts. Great basic tools for Social Media monitoring. If you need more advanced tools. ManoByte can assist you with our Brand and Reputation monitoring services.
Byte or get Bitten!
Bad Hotels
Social Media can help your business if you are really good but it can hurt you if you are really bad. Check out these bad Hotels
Byte or get bitten!
Social Media Analytics
Online Reputation Management
Here is an excerpt from Business Week. “Online reputation management evolved in the past two or three years in response to the explosion of social media that amplified the voices of individual Internet users. There are no data on how big the market is. “It’s kind of a fast-emerging field as more and more companies become aware of the need to have some sort of tracking,” says Michael Greene, an analyst at JupiterResearch who authored a report in January about responding to negative buzz online.”
ManoByte helps with reputation management by providing your company with a complete analytic view of what is being said about your company across the Social Media sphere.
Read More!
Bite or get bitten.