Measuring buzz

At the recent ClickZ web metrics event in New York there was an interesting range of topics from measuring non-transactional websites through to competitive intelligence. One of the ones that started to make me think was the one on measuring buzz, blogs and social media. There were two presentations, one from fellow columnist Shane Aitchison of Zaaz and one from Jim Nail of Cymfony, a software provider that has recently been acquired by TNS, one of the world’s largest marketing research groups.

Shane kicked off by talking through why organisations need to start to think about monitoring and measuring the amount of debate and discussion about your brands that is happening online and in blogs in particular. In essence what he was saying was this is happening, it’s not going to go away and you can either sit on the sidelines and let it happen or you can get involved and try and proactively influence and manage the situation.

It struck me whilst Shane was talking that blogs and forums are sources of unstructured consumer data on brands. In some ways it’s no different that going out and asking consumers in a survey what they think about brands other than in this case the opinions are unsolicited. This has to be available source of intelligence, particularly of companies that are concerned about the reputation of their brands.

As the old saying goes though “if you don’t measure it, you can’t manage it” and that’s why Jim Nail’s presentation was interesting. Jim outlined ways in which you can begin to structure and quantity what’s being said about you online. You can begin in a manual and ad-hoc fashion by simply monitoring what people are saying about you in blogs using news readers but the problem is that there is generally too much information to absorb and it’s difficult to analyse. Hence the need for software tools such as Cymfony.

Tools such as Cymfony effectively aggregate, structure and quantify what is being said about you and your competitors online. The software monitors the various feeds that you set up and then determines the sentiment and essence of what is being said using natural language text processing algorithms. The software can then report in a quantitative way what is being said about you and how that compares against your competitors. The case study Jim presented for example compared what people were saying in blogs about Blu-ray versus HD-DVD. It showed how you can analyse the number of posts about each format, the favourability of those posts, how that broke down across a range of issues and a range of sites.

What struck me about the tools was their ability to take unstructured and unsolicited consumer sentiment and turn it into real competitive and consumer insights. It’s not a surprise that a company like TNS has bought Cymfony as it mirrors in the online world what companies in a way have been doing in the offline world for a while. That is taking unstructured consumer and opinion former comment from surveys and turning it into marketing intelligence. As is often the case, in the online world there’s more of it and it’s difficult to control.

There is no doubt that the measurement of social media is going to be a growing field and the tools will inevitably get smarter over time. The question is whether this is going to be a subset of what we call “web analytics” or whether it’s going to be a discipline in its own right. Time will tell on that issue but in the meantime if I was a company that was worried about managing my brand reputation online I would be starting to look closely at these types of capabilities.

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