Ever have something come out of your mouth one way and become surprised to learn that the person you’re talking to heard something completely different? You can’t change what the person believes they heard, even if it’s not what you said or meant. And though the intention of your own words seemed clear, the other person’s perception is their truth.

Now imagine writing a thought down and sending it to someone. Without the benefit of body language, it’s hard to know the tone of that message, whether it’s meant to be serious or sarcastic, positive or negative. And if you don’t know the person well, the task is even harder. Just think of all the emails you write that fall into this category.

Writing is tricky, full of nuance and unspoken communication. And in the sentiment analysis game – the practice of determining whether an online conversation is either positive, negative or neutral (or mixed) in tone – that’s a sticky issue. For social media monitoring service providers, it’s a hurdle they’re trying really hard to overcome.

Here’s where things stand right now with sentiment analysis:

• Human filtering: Companies like RepuTrack use people on their team to help determine sentiment.

• Automated: Companies like Alterian’s SM2 use a complex algorithm that looks for “trigger words” to help classify conversations.

• Analyst driven: Individuals, either on the client side or a consultant being paid by the client, positioned between the monitoring platform and the end-user to verify and/or reclassify the information.

However, according to Maria Ogneva of Biz360, you can only get so close to a perfect result. “If two humans were rating an article for sentiment, they would agree 79% of the time (source of this statistic escapes me now), so automated sentiment simply can not be higher than that.”

So if that’s the case, how do you make the analysis as close to perfect as possible?

Over lunch recently with Alexandre Gravel of Toast Studio and Martin Perron of Bloom Search Marketing, we reasoned that crowdsourcing could hold the key. Over on Biz360’s blog, MarketIQ, they describe an experiment they conducted using Mechanical Turk to crowdsource sentiment analysis to verify if their own classifications were accurate. (It’s a fascinating read, take some time to digest it.)

But the question remains, how do you overcome the flaws of sentiment analysis if you’re responsible for tracking conversation related to a brand?

Become intimate with the conversation.

You read that right.

Before you even set up a single keyword search, make sure you have a thorough understanding of the brand and its environment. By getting to know the brand beforehand, you’ll understand the tone associated to it, the issues it faces and you’ll be able to outline the things you expect to hear.

Then, once you start collecting results, you’ll see and understand the trends, key influencers, lingo – and the discussions taking place will just make sense to you. Like any relationship, you’ll know what the hidden body language is within these conversations. Monitor on a daily basis and you’ll find the flow and be able to judge for yourself how a conversation should be classified.

Of course, this isn’t the perfect solution for all projects and search profiles, but no matter how you approach your social media monitoring program, if you’re not reading the results, you’re wasting your time anyway. So become intimate with the conversation and you’ll be in a better position to classify sentiment for yourself.

I’ll probably hear some good natured opposition to this post from some friends at different Social Media Monitoring companies, but I stand solidly behind this advice.

No matter which social media monitoring platform you’re committed to, use others as well.

True insight comes from using several different kinds of search engines, applications and tools. That’s not a knock on the different services, it’s reflective of the monitoring environment’s reality. By using several of the different services available – mostly for no added cost – you’ll uncover deeper intelligence, greater statistics and a better understanding of the conversation.

There may be any number of reasons for this logic, whether you’re committed to paid or free tools:

• Every algorithm is different. While one tool may be capturing certain conversations quickly, another tool may be filling in the blanks in a more timely way. By cross checking different engines, you’ll be able to catch more results sooner.

• Even if you’re using a robust, feature-rich service, there are likely many different insights that the service doesn’t incorporate. Take Twitter, for example. You’re collecting tweets, but are able to drill down about the user, who the person is connected to, since when they’ve been on Twitter, frequency of Tweets, which links they’ve posted, what pictures they’ve linked to, and so on and so on and so on? The more tools you use, and some offer very specific functionalities, the greater you’ll come to understand a particular conversation.

• Backup your main monitoring service with others, just in case. In case your system is going offline for maintenance. In case results turn up missing. In case you don’t have access to a wifi network. For example, through you may be using a web based service, you may want to download mobile applications – Tweetie and Say What? come to mind – to check in while you’re away from your computer.

• Sentiment analysis. Different services go about providing this analysis in different ways. Some automate the process, relying on different “trigger” words to reach a conclusion, others assign sentiment through human analysis, while still others leave it all up to you. As a result, if you like so many of the features offered by the platform you’re committed to, but don’t “trust” how it handles sentiment, you may want to go in a different direction to gain an accurate measure.

• Unless your platform allows you to add custom RSS sources, which helps ensure that you’re not missing any results, you’ll have to find different ways to keep track of these other results.

These are just some of what could be a very long list. And in no way is this post meant to diminish the importance of finding your comfort zone with a primary platform and sticking to it. That said, a single social media monitoring platform just isn’t enough if you really want to get more out of your monitoring program.

So, I ask you, what combination of sites, tools and applications are you using? Need ideas, here’s an exhaustive directory of social media monitoring tools that will show you the potential of what’s out there.

Building on yesterday’s post about the importance of reading the links you’re collecting through social media monitoring, today we’re going to focus on tags.

What’s a tag?

Well, if you think of the web as one big filing cabinet, a tag is the label you put on a folder within the cabinet. The beauty of these files you’re using is that you can put as many labels on them as you like.

You can create these folders in one of two ways:

1. As a content producer, you’ll use the labels (re: tags) to help others who are diving into the filing cabinet find your content. Your choice of tags is important, because you have to imagine how others will use the filing cabinet and select words that are relevant to them.Content producers will tag their content when they update their blog, post videos to YouTube, add pictures to Flickr and so forth.
2. As a content consumer, you’ll use tags to organize files that you’ll want to reference again later. Social bookmarking services like Delicious provide a practical example. When you bookmark content to your Delicious account, you’re asked to provide tags for that piece of content. You can then search through your bookmarks by tag to find related information.Of course, how you tag content as a “consumer” will help others find information within the filing cabinet as well.

Why is this important for social media monitoring? Because tags are an excellent way to see how people relate the content you’re interested in to other topics. When you examine the tags attached to a particular piece of content – or several pieces of content discovered through the same keywords – you’ll gain insights that go well beyond your keywords. Ultimately, you’ll discover new information that will help you understand the topic you’re researching that much better.

How do you think of tags?

At the workshops I give at different conferences, I show those in attendance a slide with three bullet points explaining how seeds get planted:

1. You plant seeds across the web
2. You ask others to plant seeds on your behalf
3. People are planting seeds ” good and bad ones ” for you

Point is, though, if you’re not using social media monitoring tools, you’ll never really have a full handle on when and where those seeds are planted.

To monitor the social web, your options are simple enough. You can use free tools or a paid ones. Now, I don’t want this post to become about those options, as there are many resources available on the topic. The only point I want to make is this:

If you’re not clicking through and reading the links, you’re wasting your time.

It’s one thing to collect links, as I’m sure many people do. It’s easy to look at numbers and statistics. It’s fun to watch your influence and reach grow far and wide across the web.

However, and I don’t say this lightly, if you’re not bothering to click through and read, don’t bother at all.

All the real insights come from reading.

All the relationships you’ll build will come from knowing where to interact.

And none of this can really happen unless you’re reading the posts, threads, Tweets, status updates and comments you’re collecting.

If you don’t have the time to do it yourself, have someone help you gain these insights and guide your participation. But even with a little help, take a little bit of time to read what people are saying about you. At minimum, it’ll give you a feel for the social media environment you didn’t have before.

How are you gaining insights from your social media monitoring program?

Over on the Marketing Profs’ Daily Fix Blog today, I’ve explained my decision to change the way I use my newsreader to collect information and how, by Planting Seeds throughout different networks, I’m able have the top online content come to me.

For a little context and background, though, you can start with this post:

The Old Set Up
Previously, I had pulled in feeds and assigned them to folders. I have a Tech + Tips folder (includes Mashable, Lifehacker, Venture Beat and others), a Must-Read folder (included: Steve Rubel, Armano, Saul Colt, Andy Nulman and many others), a Search Folder (Search Engine Guide, Search Engine Roundtable, Search Engine Journal), plus Healthcare and Government folders as well.

After that, I subscribed to a whack of other blogs and would read them, generally, only after I was five posts behind or more.

The result of this set up? I’d always be behind. I got stuck listening to the same voices over and over. And it became uninteresting to keep up.

First, the clean up
Recognizing that my reader had become stale, I purged many subscriptions. I’d say I probably killed about 30 to 40 subscriptions that I just hadn’t been keeping up with. Then, I completely changed up my “Must-Read” folder. Some stayed, others got booted or relegated to the “whack of other blogs” list.

Finding “Community Identified” content
Next, I decided to rely more on what I’m calling “Community Identified” content. Using social bookmarking sites and other types of aggregators, I’m allowing you and a whole lot of other people connected to me to point me to important content.

Which tools am I using? Without giving too much away from my post over at Marketing Profs Daily Fix, I’m using Delicious, Google Shared Items, Social Reader, Micro Plaza and BackType to find important posts and meet new people.

Head on over to the MPDailyFix post to learn more about each of these networks and how I’m having all this new content delivered to me through RSS. It’s a lesson in Planting Seeds through a different perspective.

Feel free to leave tips here or there, but make sure to let me know what you think!

When your goal is to get others to plant seeds on your behalf, there’s no doubt that the relationship has to be a two-way street. In other words, you’ve got to give to get. Be seen as a generous person, an individual who shares content others have created and not solely your own, and, over time, people will want to return the favour.

That’s what I began to think about when I caught a post titled, “Top 20 Ways to Share a Great Blog Post” by Ben Parr over on Mashable.

Read the post from the abovementioned POV and think about how you can become a more generous blogger or content promoter.

And, incidentally, the Mashable post, which was written on March 29 (yesterday), has been posted to Twitter 854 times, which, again, highlights the give + take nature of sharing.

Give: Link to other content you find most worthy or helpful to your audience.

Take: Create content others would want to link to and enjoy a little exposure too.

So, what are some of your secrets to sharing content?

When you put your social media plan into place and begin to plant seeds online, you have to understand a few key things that will shape your Social Media Mindset. Start by asking yourself the following questions:

• Do I understand the spirit of social media? In other words, do you realize that you have to keep things real and maintain an authentic voice?

• Do I understand the time commitment involved? Being engaged in social media requires a real commitment of your time. According to Matt Dickman, this could/should be up to two hours a day.

These are the basics. What happens next, when you’re fully engaged, is that you start to see ideas in everyday situations and your mindset evolves. An experience at the bank can lead to a blog post. You’ll tweet a link to the article you read in the paper. A must-take picture gets posted to Flickr.

An antennae goes up over your head and, suddenly, you want to share everything. What’s interesting, though, is how your mindset can evolve.

When I first started blogging, almost anything I experienced could lead to a post. I had a blogger’s mindset, as Ben Yoskovitz explained a while back. Now that I’m blogging and engaged on Twitter (among other networks), I find that my instincts are changing. I’m thinking in 140 characters more and more.

Yesterday’s post is a good example. I tweeted that cartoon about 12 hours before I posted it to this blog. Why? Because it was easy. And fast. Not that blogging isn’t any of these things, it’s just that Twitter is more. Like the new Bell Canada campaign, you can highlight the “ER” at the end. Twitter is easiER and fastER.

That’s not to say that blogging doesn’t have its place. It does, obviously. It’s just that each network you join or community you create may have it’s own purpose. It’s own benefits. Be flexible enough to evolve your thinking. Allow your mindset to change - and then focus in on the network where your thinking leads you.

You may only have time for one. But maybe you’ll have the mindset for more.

So where’s your head on this? Do you have a different mindset depending on the network you’re involved in? Let’s discuss…

When it comes to planting seeds, one of the big things you should be thinking about is how to get others to do it for you. And this applies equally to offline relationships as it does to those that are online.

So the question becomes: how to you turn your fans into a sales force? One easy way to do this is to give them a stack of your business cards. Simply put, this widens your reach and gives people a concrete way to spread the love.

Just this week, I saw the power of this thinking in action when one of my biggest fans pulled my card out of one of his desk drawers - two feet in front of me. It didn’t hurt when he added, “This is the Mark I’ve been telling you about.”

A raving recommendation. And the card to go with it.

How are you empowering people to plant seeds on your behalf?

Instead of turning to Google Notebook to share links with others, here’s an alternative using Delicious that will allow you to accomplish the same thing, while keeping your links in one account.

While, technically, there is no feature that allows you to create a notebook for link sharing similar in functionality to what Google Notebook can do, if you use Delicious creatively, you can get around this.

Here’s how:

• Create a generic account on Delicious that you’re comfortable sharing access to

• Add the generic account to your personal network on Delicious

• When you bookmark something you only want to send to the shared account, hit “Do not share” and tag it with “for:sharedaccount’susername”. Of course, you can also add other tags.

• The bookmarked item will appear in your timeline unshared and, at the same time, it will appear in the shared account’s inbox

All in all, it’s really not all that different than having a Google notebook for link sharing. Sure, you may not be able to export the Delicious links from this account to Google docs and so forth (like you can with a Google Notebook). However, you’ll benefit by having all your links in one place, ready to be categorized and searched with all your other links, the ones you’re happy to share with a wider audience.

Do you have any similar tips you’d like to share? Please do!

When you find out that someone new is following your tweets, how do you decide if you’ll follow that person back? Here are three things to look at when you look at someone’s Twitter page for the first time.

1. Their most current tweets
The first thing I do is check out the person’s most recent tweets, usually going down the first page and maybe onto a second. While doing this, I’m looking at the value of their tweets – is what they’re adding all about them or are they helping others? I’m also looking at who the person is talking to at that moment, looking for familiar names – they add credibility to the new person.

2. Who is following that person
Building on the end of the first point, the next thing I’ll skim through is the list of people following my new follower. If I recognize the people my new follower is connected to, the more likely I’ll be to add them back. One or two familiar faces on the first two pages is suffice for me, I don’t feel the need to go much deeper than that.

3. Click on the link in the profile
The last thing I’ll check on is the link in the person’s profile. Where are they pointing me to? Their own business? Their place of work? A LinkedIn profile? Facebook? At this point, I’m just looking to get a sense of what the person does, what he or she is like. If I’m really intrigued, I may even subscribe to the blog, if there is one.

In short, what I’m trying to gain is a sense of credibility for the person and comfort for myself. And, when you think about it, isn’t that what we look for when we start any relationship?

So, how do you choose who to friend or follow back?

Tags: Twitter, Twitter Tips, Social Networking, Social Networks, Social Media, Planting Seeds, Planting Seeds Online, PlantingSeeds.ca