What about Analytics in Social Media monitoring?

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.

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