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.

My first two posts in this series on Comparing Social Media Monitoring Platforms for coverage of Social Media Week NYC and Comparing Social Media Monitoring Platforms on content about Social Media Week NYC 10 examined volume and media types captured by each platform – with very different results in each case.

But what about Sentiment?

Radian6 – 81% Positive and 19% Negative Sentiment

I used “Widget Keywords” which is to say, I told Radian6 to use anything that had “social media week” in it for sentiment analysis.  I could have used Topic Profile keywords which would have broken down the results differently, similar to what Techrigy does with “Tone”.

Alterian/SM2/Techrigy – 91% Positive and 9% negative sentiment

Considering the number of posts each platform considered, the results for sentiment, on the face of it – between Radian6 and Techrigy are not as far off as I’d thought they would be.

Sysomos – had 76% Positive and 1% Negative with 23% neutral - again, not as far off as I thought they’d be.

But Brandwatch was really far off from the rest with only 1% positive and 1% negative – and the rest of the data was “neutral”.

It’s clear Brandwatch is much more strict with assigning sentiment – maybe that’s good – -not sure yet.

Biz360 had 16% Positive and 4% Negative with 81% Neutral  - quite a difference from the rest.

Of course, we need to look at what each platform considers to be negative vs. positive.  More to the point – would the same content be found in each platform to be negative – or might a negative post or comment in one platform be considered to be positive by another?

Whew ..that is a hot !!!  How far off can these platforms be ?  Remember – same exact query (Social Media Week New York City) same time period.

Radian6 – none of the 22 tweets that were flagged negative -  were actually negative  when I read then visually.

Look – Radian6, to their credit – added Sentiment Analysis by keywords just last month. I want to say it’s not the platform’s fault that people (me) don’t know how to configure or use it might be intended.

On the other hand, I put in “Social Media Week” as the keyword to do sentiment around – on a topic profile about Social Media Week NYC  – so …. you figure it out.    Let me put it another way – if you really care about the accuracy of your results around sentiment – best to look at them by hand and reclassify them to what you think they are – Radian6 may not be smart enough to tell sentiment.  There- I tried to be nice.

Alterian/SM2/Techrigy – total wash out - most of the results don’t make sense – only one or two actually have any connection with Social Media Week New York City – and they’re not negative – at least, not negative about Social Media Week -

I realize the Sentiment Analysis part of  Techrigy is going to be updated on February 1st, and it will be interesting to look at these results – then.

People I know at Techrigy have been very nice to me and bend backwards to please – and I really appreciate their support for me over the last two years -  on the other hand, as an analyst, a blogger whose opinion people respect in this area, for this query – the results Techrigy returned were less than useless – they actually are a detractor.  I’m glad there’s an update in a few days – Sentiment Analysis needs an update, badly.

BrandWatch – 2 negative results – both were negative

Yes, let’s call a “spade a spade” - these two tweets do have a negative tone - look for yourself.   Congratulations Giles Palmer – you  and your team won this challenge -  maybe the English got this one right – sentiment analysis -  at least in this case – the results make sense.

Sysomos - the sentiment results were generally good -  I did not find any negative blog posts according to Sysomos, so I looked at the positive and neutral posts and I found them to be reasonable in their classification of Social Media Week Content – many of the Mashable posts about Social Media Week were listed  and it’s fair to read that as “positive” since they support and give attention to Social Media Week.

Unlike Brandwatch, Sysomos didn’t find any negative tweets and classified them all as neutral - perhaps that is not far from the truth – I would rather have a result be classified as neutral than have it be flagged as positive or negative by the system when it’s clearly not, having looked at it visually.   Sysomos treated news stories in mainstream media as either neutral or positive – again, Sysomos assignment of sentiment was reasonable – so maybe it’s a tie between Brandwatch and Sysomos.

What about Biz360? – the negative sentiment selections were pretty poor and looked like the same things that Sysomos flagged as positive, Biz360 flagged as negative.

It’s really hard to imagine most of what was picked up by Biz360 could be negative – just look at the titles of the content it selected.  I do like that Biz360 qualifies the reach of a piece of content while the other platforms that are being looked at here do not offer that feature, today.

Taking this all in – I need to say that I seriously question a “marketer” who builds a Social Media Monitoring platform is going to come up with a satisfactory solution for many of the things that are really important to measure – and to accurately gauge.

Radian6 is getting better – but the problem is, as far as sentiment goes – there’s too much that has to be done on a configuration level to get sentiment right – I know they  will continue to improve – but they also come from a “marketing” background and the Flash Interface, that makes their product look better than the others, is also, at time, frustrating to work with.

Alterian/Techrigy/SM2 – well …. they know Sentiment isn’t their strong point – they have a good technology and have improved alot over the years – yet they too, are built from a marketing perspective – and that can be a problem, because marketers aren’t that good at technology – that’s the same issue as Biz360, in my opinion – but look – I could be wrong – hell, I hope I am.

Brandwatch – I don’t know what their origins are – but I have met and spoken to Giles Palmer – who founded Brandwatch several years ago – and they consider themselves to be the #1 platform in Europe – their sentiment analysis seems to be better than most, based on my experience with it so far – and from what Giles tells me – they do a lot of work to make it and keep it that way.

Sysomos, the more I work with it, the more I like – Sysomos was built by a programmer and a university- the University of Toronto – and their backend is able to splice and dice data very well – Sysomos is more like a programming think tank that grew into marketing – yes,  their interface could improve – but the sentiment analysis and noise suppression are excellent.

So, there you have it – Sentiment Analysis – buyer beware – for the time being, if your going to have large amounts of data you need to score with automated sentiment analysis – I think you’ll be best off with Sysomos or Brandwatch, all things being equal.

And look, I’m open to discussion and reexamining my results (I don’t know a lot of what goes on behind the interface)- clearly – a lot more deep dives into the data of all the platforms are needed – but that’s precisely what most Social Media Monitoring Platform make it hard to do – and yes, a couple of analysts types have looked at these platforms, including Forrester and Nathan Gilliatt who will be at Monitoring Social Media Bootcamp with me in London in two months and a sample of his ebook is encouraging (and the new book he’s working on is going to be even better).

Nathan’s approach, as far as I can tell – is to look at these platforms more as a “buyers” guide  – similar to what Phil Kemelor does with Web Analytics platforms for CMSWatch.

My approach is hands on – how well does these platforms work for what we use them for?

I don’t think anyone else in the field actually does that - and this post alone – shows that.

By the way, if you want to get far more than even what I can write here – hire me to help you – and please join me at Monitoring Social Media Bootcamp in London on March 31st. 2010.

Tickets are on sale now.

I recently talked with Stephen Debruyn recently about his list of social media monitoring vendors – DEFINITIVE GUIDE TO SOCIAL MEDIA MONITORING/CORPORATE REPUTATION MEASUREMENT FIRMS and felt I might use the guide  as a jumping off point to how Social Media Monitoring grew in 2009 and I’m working on a PowerPoint Presentation, now.

Note: in the post following this one – I put out a theory that Google is the main driver of this increase – which makes sense to me since Google is the driver of so much Web 2.0 Traffic – see 400% Rise in Social Media Traffic due to Search Engines – Google for more information and the next piece of this puzzle.

Used Alterian/Techrigy/SM2 platform to monitor what was being said about each brand in Debruyn’s guide with additional queries for “social media monitoring” and “social media buzz”, etc.

I noticed a curious thing – since this summer the volume of conversations about Social Media (focusing on monitoring Social Media) increased 400% from what it was at the beginning of this year, and for all of 2008.

I questioned the accuracy of the data I collected from Alterian, as I this profile took up most of  my 200,000 searches limit and wondered if it didn’t actually complete – and that’s what I was seeing.

Used Google Insights for Search and found, more or less, a similar pattern of “Social Media” searches increasing by 400% this year – and compared it to SEO, SEM searches, which haven’t changed.

That gets me to the reason I am writing this post – not so much to find out about the 400% increase, as interesting as it is, as to see which of the social media monitoring firms, which make a living monitoring the web, are generating buzz around their own brands, and highlights of what what was being said about them.

More later, as I complete this study and try to figure out what it all means.