Fern Halper is a partner at Hurwitz & Associates. She is a renowned expert on analytics and information management. She is a frequent speaker at analytics events and a well known consultant and commentator. I am pleased that Fern is contributing to my blog.
By Fern Halper
I was speaking to a client the other day. This company was very excited about tracking its brand using one of the many listening posts out on the market. As I sat listening to him, I couldn’t help but think that a) it was nice that his company could get its feet wet in social media monitoring using a tool like this and b) that they might be getting a false sense of security because the reality is that these social media tracking tools provide a fairly rudimentary analysis about brand/product mentions, sentiment, and influencers. For those of you not familiar with listening posts here’s a quick primer.
Listening Post Primer
Listening posts monitor the “chatter” that is occurring on the Internet in blogs, message boards, tweets, etc. They basically:
- Aggregate content from across many, many Internet sources.
- Track the number of mentions of a topic (brand or some other term) over time and source of mention.
- Provide users with positive or negative sentiment associated with topic (often you can’t change this, if it is incorrect).
- Provide some sort of Influencer information.
- Possibly provide a word cloud that lets you know what other words are associated with your topic.
- Provide you with the ability to look at the content associated with your topic.
I recently came across your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment.
I don’t know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often.
Thank You
PowerBuilder development company
I’d like to draw your readers’ attention to my new book The Future of Analytics (http://www.amazon.com/Future-Analytics-trends-implications-ebook/dp/B003LY48D2/), which includes a section on the role cloud computing will play.
Thank you,
John B.