Social Media is a young market and with no clear rules or standards companies have been left to define the space themselves, carving up niches left right and center. One such baby-bell sized niche is that of ‘sentiment‘. The idea has been to accurately measure the ‘mood‘ in which people talk about your brand.
“Mood? Sorry, I’m not in”.
Now, obviously the idea of this sounds preposterous but there are technologies out there that well, sort of do an okay job. That’s not what really concerns us, the worrying thing is how it’s become a ‘buzzword’ that some agencies throw into a deck with no idea what it even involves!
Those that have seen the word ‘sentiment‘ in a pitch but never thought to ask any questions then it might be an idea to check up now.
Ask yourself:
- What tools are being used to measure sentiment?
- What is being measured? emoticons, positive wording?
- What other stats are they reporting on? After all, sentiment isn’t a great indicator.
So how can sentiment be used?
At this stage sentiment is more of a nice idea than a practical solution. However, it can be used in ‘brand reputation‘ as part of ongoing online monitoring. The trick is to use sentiment as a dial and if the dial makes any major shifts then investigate the cause. If something does go wrong for your brand it can be useful when cross-referencing changes in conversations and articles.
That spike in traffic wasn’t down to the great PR work you agency put in! 
For further reading check out some comments by Guilhelm Fouetillou (linkfluence)
What are your thoughts? Is sentiment tracking worthwhile or a bit of a con? Is all to be taken with a pinch of salt? Are you using one of the many ’sentiment’ tools to track your brands popularity? Let us know in the comments.
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