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.

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?

Consider this for a second: there are millions and millions of websites out there and billions and billions of pages of content online. So what are you going to do to reach people, knowing that it’s a difficult task to get them to your website?

You Plant Seeds online. You build outposts. You get out there on other sites and work it.

Today, I’ve added a new seed to the effort, creating a Facebook Page for Transmission Content + Creative, my business.

No doubt that it’s a work in progress, but I’d love to know what you think. Head on over and add your thoughts to the discussion board, post a review, answer a poll question or add a picture or video. Remember, same thing applies there as applies here - the page is just as much yours as it is mine. So have fun with it.

You’ll find the page here: Transmission Content + Creative on Facebook.

I hope I’ll find you there.

UPDATE: Seems the link to the TC+C page isn’t working properly. Here’s the right destination, plus I’ve corrected the ones above. Sorry!

Here’s a new “Post from the Past“. This, one, titled, “Behind your back”, was originally posted on June 29, 2007.

It’s all about listening, which is a major topic over on this blog - and will be increasing in focus as we move on.

Would love to get your thoughts on this line of thinking. Comment lines are open!

BEHIND YOUR BACK
29 June 2007, 1:18 pm

People are talking behind your back. All the time. Online. In conversations that never die.

What’s so interesting about this? To me, it’s seeing who’s listening. And there are ways to see who’s listening (just visit the Social Media Wiki to find out how). After listening, though, comes responding. Letting people know that you hear what they’re saying. Whether it’s positive or negative.

In the past week or so, I’ve seen examples of good and bad listeners.

First the good. Hats off to Tom Abbott over at Warwick University. In a comment I left over at Shel Israel’s blog, I linked to Warwick as an example of a school that’s doing well with social media programs. Tom, head of the podcasting program at Warwick, responded to the comment over at Shel’s and sent me a personal email. In it, he offered his time, letting me know that he’d share more information with me if I was interested.

His response felt good. Made me feel valued, listened to.

Now the bad. As a customer of the TD Bank, I’m not sure they have an online pulse. I’ve written about the service (negatively) at a branch several times. I know they saw what I wrote - I know it with 100% certainty, thanks to Google Analytics - but nothing. No “We hear you”. Nothing.

This makes me feel shut out, roped off, ignored.

Companies are going to have to make online monitoring and responding a given. A natural. A job title. These are the conversations that will live on forever - with a gaping void right down the middle of them if they never respond. And, thanks to search engines, they’ll live on and on and on and on. Like zombies, they’ll come back from the dead to haunt until they’re addressed.

It plays right into the Give + Take attitude. In fact, it’s just a common courtesy to respond to someone who’s talking to you - or about you. Even if it’s behind your back.

What are some examples of times when you’ve felt roped off, ignored? Conversely, if you have positive stories of companies that listened and responded well, I’d love to hear those too.

Every now and then I’ll pull an old post from my original blog and repost it here. There are new readers here, people who are just getting to know me. I’d like to share some of my original thinking with you, so you can see where the Planting Seeds analogy originated and how my thinking has shaped.

So, here’s the first Post from the Past. Originally posted on May 2, 2007, you’ll see how the 4 Ps of Blogging evolved into the LRI model I discuss here.

Looking forward to your new thoughts on this topic!

I’ve been trying to come up with a simple and easy way to explain to someone who’s never blogged before how to get into it in the right way. And, while I hate to add to the pile of 4P theories that have been knocked into our heads since college, this still remains an easy-to-remember device.

THE 4Ps TO STARTING A BLOG

1. Participate

For people coming in from out in the cold, participation is the key to understanding how the culture of blogging works. Potential bloggers need to visit other sites, read, comment and connect with the writers. The purpose of the participation phase is two-fold:

• To understand what’s involved, gain a sense of the commitment and help the potential blogger develop their own style, which happens by reading a variety of other blogs.
• Participating is also like raising a flag to other bloggers to tell them you’re in the game. Essentially, you’re developing a network to connect with and lean on when you start, which is also good for loading up your blogroll when the time comes.

2. Plan

Now that you visited other blogs and see how they’re organized, it’s time to start thinking about your own blog. This is the strategy phase. What will your blog be called? What URL will you secure? Which platform will you use - WordPress, Typepad, other? Start thinking about the tone of your blog. Consider your design, categories, tagline - everything that goes into developing a professional presence. Start writing your “about” page and your inaugural post.

At this stage, for the less technical, you’ll want to consult with a designer who can help you create the look and feel you’re after. Remember, your blog is a key element to developing a personal brand. Content is one thing, how it’s presented is quite another.

3. Practice

Once your plan is laid out, start practising. Become familiar with the blogging platform you’ll be using. Learn how to add categories, create links, edit, upload photos, import photos, and fix the little problems that come up from time to time. If you don’t know what those problems are, find a blogger on the same platform and ask. (Don’t worry, all this sounds more difficult than it really is.)

Start writing some posts and have someone critique them for you. And then keep writing. The more you write, the more your style will develop. You’ll also find your blogger’s mindset, so you can hit the ground running when you launch. In addition, you’ll have a bank of posts to choose from when you’re blogging.

4. Post

You’ve launched your blog. All the elements are in place. Now it’s time to get posting. Develop a schedule, decide on a minimum number of posts to make every week and try to stick to it. Then, once you’re in the flow of things, increase your frequency as you gain comfort.

The most important thing to note as you go through these four steps is that once you pass into the next P, the others never stop. You’ll always participate, plan and practice, even when you’ve moved into the posting phase. Blogging is an ongoing process at all levels, so while you have to start at the beginning, don’t think of it as graduating to the next step - it’s more like you’re building in a new step when you’re ready.

And these, good readers, are the 4Ps of starting a blog: Participate, plan, practice, post.

•

What are your thoughts on the 4 Ps? How do you see Listening, Responding + Initiating Conversations fitting in?

It occurred to me that some of you may be visiting as a result of us meeting at the Advanced Learning Institute’s Social Media for Government conference in Ottawa this week. And if you’re here to see what I’ve done to earn the right to present a workshop, you may find this site to be, ah, a little thin on content.

But that’s only because I’ve just launched this site.

I have, however, been blogging for about two years over here. And in January, I was invited to blog over at the MP Daily Fix, a blog over on the MarketingProfs site.

To get to know me a little better, check out some of these posts:

• Plant seeds to cultivate your brand – a post that was the first step towards this site you’re on now
• I believe strongly in Give + Take Marketing
• I’m a book lover and have a never-ending supply of new and old business books
• And I am deeply frustrated with traditional marketing

Dig into the archives over at the Transmission Content + Creative blog. Feel free to comment over there as well. While I’ll mostly be concentrating on this site and growing my presence on the Daily Fix blog and elsewhere online, the two years I spent blogging over there were the catalyst for Planting Seeds – and I simply wouldn’t be here without having blogged there.

(For those who are wondering what will become of that site, the answer will be revealed in due time!)

Looking forward to getting to know you better here too!