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Sentiment Measurement Beyond Metrics

You know, headlines like that one really put me on the fence, balancing between "Ooh! Metrics!" and "Wow, no wonder people think it's boring and geeky."

ANYWAY...today I'm definitely in the former camp, in the sense that it's exciting because it's a philosophical puzzle: how can you solve a problem that can never really be solved?

Yesterday, I commented on Avinash Kaushik's post where he asked, "If you were to measure the success of a company’s social media efforts how would you do it?" My answer:
For social media, the obvious metrics still hold: referrals and conversions from referrals.

But being from a nonprofit background, where the higher-ups are often skeptical of social media, the real metrics are the words. There’s nothing more valuable than the tweet that says "I love that {your org} is on Twitter" or the time you respond to a comment on Facebook addressing a wide concern about your organization or when you comment on a blog and the author is blown-away impressed that he got your attention. Those are the things that really get the higher-ups’ attention. And that’s the social media that I want to measure, because that’s what makes a difference to the organization.
To expand on that, at nonprofits, managers tend to be skeptical and stereotyping of social media. They think of comments as the land of the crazies, blogs as being only about self-obsession, and social networks as only for kids and techies and just fads that are soon to pass.

So it's not just sentiment analysis that I'm talking about, mostly because the tools I've seen that try to gauge sentiment as metrics are crap. Now, maybe there's some enterprise solution that's done a better job at metric-ing sentiment, but what's more important when trying to convince the skeptics is showing actual words. Telling a manager that we got "17 favorable tweets" isn't anywhere near as valuable as the single tweet that says "What an amazing service you're providing, and we're thrilled that you're on Twitter."

Now, maybe later down the road, a line graph showing increased favorable comments and tweets will be valuable, but until then, you're much better off with a short list of text of individual comments, tweets and blog posts that give a quick and clear sum to "social media isn't what you think it is, and this is why we should be doing it."
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