I was working on this blog post this morning. I think it is really relevant to our discussion at the very end of class regarding how companies react to comments posted on social networks.
More and more companies are looking for help in monitoring what people and customers are saying about them online on social networking sites. There are a growing number of young companies and a few established ones that are offering tools and software to companies that allow them do such things as measure the volume of social media chatter, predict overall sentiment on a particular product or campaign, and show how their competitors are being talked about.
According to the article, the day when shopping websites can use social media analytics to offer you special deals on cameras when you visit there site because they know you talk about them online is not very far away. Soon social media software could alert a hotel receptionist that a particular person checking into the hotel deserves extra courtesy because he is likely to mention it online to his 10,000 “friends”. Researchers at Hewlett Packard even claim their software can accurately predict a Hollywood movie’s box office takings by counting how often it is mentioned on Twitter before it opens
Many of the services offered by these companies though are still considered rudimentary with accuracy levels as low as 60%. The reason the accuracy levels can be so low is that analysis still falls victim to ever changing slang used particularly in the social networking world. “This movie is going to kill it” could be determined by the software to be negative when in fact it could be a sign of excitement by some people.
Even if the social networking monitoring tools offered are not near perfect (yet), can companies really risk not investing in them to try and learn more about what people are saying about them online? Do you think using social networking analytics will ever account for a huge portion of companies PR/Marketing budgets?
This is really interesting, and I recently had a conversation about something really similar. A friend of mine is working at Branded Evolution (http://www.brandedevolution.com/) and they have developed ways to follow users through different websites so that marketers not only know what they clicked on in their own environment but where they went afterwards and what they did there - so they get an even better understanding of their customer. I thought it was fascinating.
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