This is a big fat topic, Reconciliation and Health Care Reform,  and it occurred to me, one that would be perfect for a Crimson Hexagon Opinion Monitor – just like the one they did on the Winter Olympics yesterday – see How We Hate NBC’s Olympics Coverage: A Statistical Breakdown.   I don’t have access to the Opinion Monitor to use in this fashion.

It’s too big a subject for me to really cover well there – but I’ll try to touch on it.

However, I’ll use social monitoring tools I do have at my disposal that I can use for my own personal use (so I can write about it) – and try to answer the question of how people feel about reconciliation of the Health Care Reform bill currently in Congress.  These days I’m getting access to almost any platform I want to write about …. so maybe this will come to pass too, with CH.  By the way, based on Crimson Hexagon’s analysis of the Winter Olympics – there’s not much love in the house for NBC and 73% expressed negative sentiment – I’ll leave it at that.

So how do people who are talking about  Health Care Reconciliation feel about it – is it what Senator Coburn warns against majority-vote tactic in weekly Republican address? – the story that got me thinking about writing this post.

Based on what Sysomos Map is saying – the overall sentiment is for Reconciliation – if we can interpret the data that way and I have found Sysomos pretty good in that department is favorable towards Reconciliation of the Health Care bill -and that’s different than the hype we hear from the “football game” going on in Washington DC right now – here’s the monitoring that took place over the last 6 months – with the query being “reconciliation AND “Health Care” AND (healthcare OR “healthcare summit” OR tactic OR Obamacare)”

With a Crimson Hexagon Opinion Monitor I could have gone into the specific attitudes people are taking about Heath Care reform and Reconciliation – maybe that’s the only platform that can go that far – but still I can accomplish a lot with the tools I have.

I, personally, would like to see the Health Care bill Reconciled – that might color my perception.

Finding that before we can really gauge online sentiment on this subject -   must get even more precision than, perhaps I can get with the tools I’m using here.   I found too many places where I wasn’t really sure what I was looking at – so I won’t stand behind this analysis – this just an exploration to see what I could come up with – I don’t claim it’s accurate or not – just what I noticed while looking into this matter.

But if I’m looking for evidence online that might be construed to say that people are favorable  to the idea of Reconciliation of the Health Care bill, I may have found it – and if other people want to pull out polls that say people are not for Reconciliation – that can do that – it’s still a free country and everyone can have their own opinion. Invariably, what we seek, we will find – and if our reality is Quantum, and white is black for some people, while for others it is gray, welcome to our world – the world we live in today.

According to Sysomos Map – all this chatter has been, really, only taking place in a few places – most of the rest of the country is curiously silent or under-represented.

And Guess what – according to Sysomos Map – most of the conversations are from men.

To me that says this conversation online isn’t actually being equally vetted by all the constituents  – Sysomos picks up most of the chatter is from middle aged and senior males – now, if we could only figure out their political affiliation, we’d have something!

The more I look at this – the more I am convinced the conversation online is being manipulated to some extent – I would like to think it’s coming from opponents to the bill but I can’t really say that yet.

True, Sysomos is only able to gather industry affiliation  with about 5% of the blog posts it monitored over the last 6 months – but 19% of what it picked up is from “Communications” and that raises a red flag – what if the message of what is actually happening in Washington is being drowned out by people who are spreading the messages they want or are paid, to spread.   Why are so many of the profiles from “communications” …. hmmm.


But then again, isn’t the sentiment overall positive?  Positive about what?  What is the real topic being measured?  This is really a pull between Red and Blue – most of the chatter is really coming from a couple of places – the rest is defused and not that focused.

What we can see right now is the main “handles” to this conversation on reconciliation are the legislation is perceived to be “Democratic Senate legislation”  that can be filibustered by Republicans – that’s the main theme here in the buzzgraph, below.

And there’s some key conversations that are being picked out from blogs

and opposed, Americans are – a poll taken by oft liberally skewed gallup says that 49% of Americans oppose the democratic healthcare bill while only 42% support it.

in the wake of the white house’s health care summit, reconciliation is still seen as the likely route that congressional leaders and their liberal allies will take to jam obamacare through congress.

on Christmas eve the senate passed obamacare with no public option, a provision that allows federal monies to go to abortion and a tax on high-cost health plans.

the plan is for the house to pass the senate version of obamacare, then for the house and senate to use the health care nuclear option to pass a new bill that amends the old bill.

the american people should take note that washington continues to view their opposition with contempt and politicians would like you to believe that they know what is best for america.

reich argues that “republicans have done a far better job scaring americans about health care reform than any pollster has been able to uncover.”

furthermore, obama appeared to set a new deadline by the end of march for passing a deal with the gop before passing obamacare via reconciliation..

translated into english this means that they are worried that if the american people are allowing time to read the president’s new proposal and review it, then there could be a problem with passage.

the bipartisan blair house summit was merely some feel good politics before the real effort by democrats to jam an unpopular obamacare bill through congress using a the procedural nuclear option.

it would be interesting for the left to produce other bills that have failed during the use of the regular order for a bill, necessitating congress to resort to reconciliation.

interesting that by a margin of 59 to 34 percent, americans want congress to start over on health care reform if there was no bipartisan consensus reached at the health care summit.

they want to rid the senate of the filibuster and the reconciliation procedure, the health care nuclear option, is a means to get what they could not get when they followed the rules.

that bill contained a public option, strong anti-abortion language and an income surtax on wealthy individuals, but it has been tossed aside in this new strategy.

after a month from now, he will probably try to use a maneuver called budget reconciliation to pass the proposal with a simple majority in the house of representatives and the senate.

politico and others are reporting that obama intends to discard any pretense of bipartisanship early next week and work on pushing obamacare through both houses of congress.

Recently I mentioned Google’s entrance into Social Media Monitoring (refer to my long post with Cecilia Pinada Feret on  “I’ve been saying this is coming” – Big Brother & Google’s Entrance into Social Media Monitoring – from MyCustomer.com) but in a way, they have already entered into this space - or, at least, their infrastructure and code has, via Google Apps, t hanks to a tip from Luke at OurSocialTimes.com who is also producing Monitoring Social Media BootCamp on March 31st 2010 that I’ll be speaking at (hope you come if your nearby at the time).

…thought you might be interested in this:  http://realmon9.appspot.com/ It’s a Google App for monitoring (only in test mode) – but cool huh!

Cool indeed!   Mind you, there’s a big difference between a Google Apps Developer getting into Social Communications Monitoring – and Google – the 900 pound gorilla doing it – but I bet Google is watching …. and waiting … and listening …..

The real question isn’t about what to build to monitor conversations – that’s over; it’s about what to choose – choice and value.   The information itself is free and potentially valueless (not to say it has no value – but the only meaning it actually has is in how it’s delivered).

Think of tubes of paint in the Art Store – before anything is produced – looking and even smelling the art supplies – that’s marvelous – but once you open up the tubes of paint and apply color to canvas - its what you do with the information that is meaningful – and it’s part of the factor of weather the Art is appreciated can collected, or not. Social Information is like that tube of paint you so want to use – but means nothing without the right context.

So Social Monitoring is a commodity – when you have Viralheat and Andy Beal’s Trackur in the room, doing good stuff for free or for a few bucks a month – just collecting data is a given – it’s what you do with that information that now counts, and what I’ll cover in depth in London next month.

Now that we have someone building Social Media Monitoring formally on Google’s Infrastructure – can Google, itself, be far behind? Does anyone still doubt that Google will dip their foot in our pond?  I don’t – because they already are – it’s just a matter of degree, now.  Let’s take a closer hood at Web2express provides the following custom services for social media monitoring:

First, Web2Expres s is powered by  …… and is is  free.

.. all the great stuff that Radian6 did with Salesforce.com and WebTrends last year …. going to be free, free, free …  this year – the advantage will come from how the data is packaged.  In fact, the only thing we’re going to end up having to pay for is Time – the time it takes to create meaning from this data.

As a use case study – the makes of Web2Express are monitoring the monitors themselves, Radian6, Sysomos, Scout Labs, etc …… just take a look (need to login using your Google Account).  I don’t mean to make an ant into a molehill here – but we can not but look at this as the attempt of someone who wants to enter the monitoring space with a free service that others are paying for.  How is that going to play out later this year and into next?

I don’t see any sentiment analysis – but I do see market segmentation – even though I can not really do much at this point – I’m logged in as a guest and there is not much for me to do but look around.

Thoughts about this?

Almost every problem we have,  had or ever  will have -  has already been solved by someone, somewhere who had the same or a similar problem and we just don’t always know it.

Fast forward to the present – I had a problem  collecting restaurant reviews  and a feeling  answers to the problem I have/ had, already existed somewhere else.

It’s like that with restaurants – based on the restaurant I’m working with – reviewing Yelp, CitySearch, OpenTable, SeamlessWeb, to name a few of restaurant review sites into one place, and adding additional social media monitoring with semantic analysis – this reporting appeared last year with Boorah reputation reports for restaurants.

Note: I suspect Boorah was bought by Intuit – as not all the links work on Boorah and there is a link to the updated reputation monitoring on  Intuit.

One of the reasons to have reputation management automated is to save community managers who work with social media the task of manually going to rating services and noting reviews for a weekly or monthly report; this seems like it’s a prime example of a common task that ought to be automated – whereas, people are much better focused on engagement and customer loyalty – and if you can find a solution that avoids having to manually compile all the ratings from Yelp, Citysearch, OpenTable, SeamlessWeb, etc – into a spreadsheet, so much the better.

Another reason to have reputation management for restaurants automated – most owners and managers of restaurants don’t know how to work with social media yet, nor do they have the time or inclination by default.  As a result, the task of monitoring the online reputation of a restaurant or any business has barely been touched upon by most people.

Besides, I noticed that all the Social Media Monitoring platforms I have looked at do not track Yelp, or CitySearch, or OpenTable (reservations manager) – even Radian6 does not track Yelp – and adding Yelp/OpenTable as sources of traffic doesn’t help (Radian6 allows you to add sources you wish to monitor that are not tracked by default).  So, even if  you wanted to use Radian6 to track your restaurant reviews – you’d be out of luck, today.  The rest of the platforms also fail here  – no one got it right, yet.

Though Boorah doesn’t appear to work that well anymore – at $99.00 per month,  a service called Reputation Ranger might be the best answer.  Here’s a description from Reputation Ranger’s site:

Reputation Ranger for Restaurants and Bars tracks review activity on over 40 food and drink review websites.  We filter out the chatter and deliver all the meaningful and important customer comments to you in one, easy to understand, reputation report.

It seems to me, again, if your promoting a restaurant using Social Media – or if a Social Media Community manager had been hired to represent the brand, online -  keeping a list of reviews from  restaurant review sites might be part duties being assigned to the Community Manager – but I think such as decision is  not the most effective use of time and money for  someone who is tasked with representing the brand as  a researcher for online sentiment about a particular restaurant.

Another solution to reputation management of restaurants is Google Places – see Google Looks Beyond Review Sites: Now Aggregates Posts from Local Blogs on Place Pages -

The Google Places review acts as a hub – providing links to all the other online review sites and a summary (excerpt) of what some people  have said about the restaurant in each place – but Google’s service is not designed to be a monitoring solution .

However, by creating these review aggregation pages, Google  magnified a reputation monitoring problem most restaurants have.

” …. For users, this means that Google’s meta-analysis of customer reviews is now able to look at a broader base of reviews. For businesses, however, this means that they now have to pay more attention to reviews on blogs. For local bloggers, as Blumenthal rightly points out, this means that their reach and influence could increase exponentially once Google includes their blogs on these pages.”

And that gets back to reputation monitoring of restaurant sites – I suspect Social Media Monitoring platforms will catch up and capture the data from CitySearch, Yelp, etc – but for now – you might want to try reporting that focuses just on that – like Reputation Ranger.

But since I haven’t tried Reputation Ranger I can’t tell you how good it is – but I would welcome the opportunity to try it.