I’m at the Pluggedin Social Media Summit most of Tuesday but I wanted to quickly cover a few post I read in Gary Angel’s blog, SEMANGEL, about Social Media Measurement.

In the most recent post of the series, Sampling and Social Media, Gary points out that some of the uses of social listening that are typical for many reports are based on inaccurate samples (and it very may well be that it is impossible, in the current day, to get good enough samples do accurate reporting on Share of Voice, Share of Sentiment, possible trending charts as well).  At least, that is how I read the post.

On the other hand, social media measurement is great for things that don’t require representative samples, like Focus Groups, and I’m sure Gary Angel will go into more details and examples as his series on Social Media Measurement continues.

But my point really is something else.

I wrote Social Media Analytics to disambiguate the choices we need to make between disparate systems and processes (where it’s hard to look under the hood and see what’s really there – hence the Data Audit I posted yesterday, as one attempt to see “what’s really there”).  But the other question, that is even more significant, perhaps, is this.

Are social media analytics platforms being sold for the wrong reasons?

Are people buying these platforms expecting to do Share of Voice, Share of Sentiment, Trend Lines (pretty much all they do, besides a “river of news” verbatim, out of the box) when these are exactly the very things they can’t do well, based on what Gary put forward in last post?

I think so.

Anyway, here’s part of the latest SEMANGEL post

…. I’ll have more to say in future posts about the whole idea of sentiment analysis. I’m not convinced that social media measurement is the proper channel for measuring either brand awareness or brand sentiment. Much of the reason for my skepticism comes down to the fact that Social Media measurement isn’t based on a valid sample at any level. This doesn’t mean Social Media measurement isn’t interesting or important. It does mean that it can’t fulfill every function equally and of the functions that are most problematic, brand sentiment may be tops on the list!

Many thanks to Michael Healy and Christopher Berry for their thoughts at the panel (and Marshall Sponder as well since he and I talked on Friday). We had a great turnout – which was nice to see – and the discussion was lively and interesting.

 

By the way, it was great speaking to Gary as well, last week.

Looking forward to the rest of the Social Media Measurement series, where I’m sure Gary is going to tell us the great things these platforms can be used for.    My sense it that the best applications of Social Media Measurement will be those where a significant amount of work will be needed, it’s the very things that people, I bet, are trying to avoid doing (why they bought those damn social analytics systems in the first place -ha!).

But seriously, maybe there is something here – are people just trying to do the wrong things with these listening systems, are are the being sold to do things they really can’t do well?