I’ll take the second, first.  Google‘s Feedburner showed over 4000 RSS subscribers yesterday, shows about 1800 today, showed 3400 for Monday and Tuesday of this week – I wonder when they are going to fix their problem – or does make sense to show the Feedburner chicklet at all?    This is one example of when things go bad with Google – and they’re taking a long time to figure it out.    I know they’re trying to make the subscriber count more accurate – but … is what they’re doing now an improvement?  I don’t think so.

Anyway, yesterday I happened to look at Alterian/SM2/Techrigy emotions report and realized it could be a lot more useful that I initially thought.

I’m looking at a profile of Havana Central - the Cuban restaurant chain I’m doing some analytics enablement work for realized the emotions chart could be a way to categorize the type of conversations taking place – it’s a beginning and obviously someone needs to dig in and categorize it further – but here’s the idea, anyway:

Since Havana Central is a restaurant I would expect a lot of the conversations to contain references to “ingesting” something – like food or drink.  I imagine it also makes sense the most common reference is to “Social” which isn’t really an emotion – it’s more of an activity.  Leisure comes right up there too.

Breaking it down – when conversations talk about ingesting – what are they saying?

What we could here – is break down further – get the main themes for ingesting – and present that as report.

Now, Techrigy has some tools that could help, but they don’t work with emotions – just categories – which is unfortunate in this case – as the Advanced Themes  chart might have done most of the heavy lifting.

If, in addition to categories, you also had the emotions and activities – something that would not be hard for them to do – is would be a very interesting chart you could produce – I think – but as I have not seen it yet (because it doesn’t exist) I don’t know for sure .. all I say is – they should do this.

Right now all I get when I look at Havana Central for major themes over the last month is this (above) – not bad – and you can click on each of the circle and get the posts mentions corresponding  – and of course, the larger circles mean more posts – but you can also see the circle are not that close together (related) – and that’s an area that ought to be looked at.   What would make these conversations more related that is not happening?  That is a question for the Social Analyst (me) to answer.

But you can more or less see where I’m going with this post – Techrigy does give you a quick way to categorize conversations round any profile you set up.  You may even be able to make a pitch saying – “here’s your conversations now” … and “here’s how we’re going to change them” … and use this report as the basis.
About a year ago I wrote a post on this part of Techrigy – looking at Sophisticated Audience – and found the report promising – but lacking a good way to export the data and work on it more.

It’s as if Techrigy has a lot of good starts – but never carried those ideas as far as they could logically go – the tool was good – it just could have been better – but the emotion view is unique – no other platform I worked with actually has this.

One of the views you could have gotten to here – “what kind of foods to people talk about eating here” – and then extracted that out of this report … or what kind of food / drink  customers complain about?    You could really dive in – main problem is SM2/Techrigy never built to platform for that – but like I say – they have good ideas – but if your going to use their platform as I suggest – you’ll need to export into Excel and do a lot of filtering and possibly – transformations on the data – something they ought to be doing , in my opinion.