My Sentiments Exactly

As I was looking for an article to write about today, I randomly selected 3 from my goggle alerts email on social networking. Turns out they were all about the same thing, which was what I already wrote about yesterday: monetizing social networks through advertising. Hot Topic, but to spare all of my readers (hi Michelle), I will choose something else to discuss.

I attended a webinar today that discussed how to measure Web 2.0 technologies. Just to clarify, that includes things like video, consumer generated content (my favorite), RSS, & widgets. This is a hot topic on the minds of interactive marketers these days as clients want to know what all of this means for their brands. When we talked about measuring consumer generated content (which includes social networks), one of the panelist talked about looking at it in two ways: 1) User generated content on your own site and 2) User generated content on other sites. Since measuring your own site is relatively straight forward, I want to skip to discussing user generated content on other sites.

How many people read product reviews before making a purchase online? The answer is a lot, in fact I was just reading reviews today for a pair of shoes I wanted to buy. Reviews are becoming a mainstream, and trusted source of product info for online consumers - whether it be on an e-commerce website, blog, etc. In the past, many marketers have measured "buzz" online, which basically tracks how often a product/term/brand is mentioned in some form or fashion online. What this doesn't do is track what people are actually saying. The panelist brought up the concept of tracking "sentiment" instead, which I thought was really interesting. By tracking sentiment you would not only be able to see how much people were talking, but also get a heat map of how they were feeling about the product. This is truly where the opportunity is as the technology to do this is not really fleshed out yet. Once companies and marketers knew what people were saying, they would be able to better determine how to actually use the data to drive actionable recommendations. Just knowing someone is talking about you does not really help define how to continue to move the needle in a positive direction. By being able to identify the segments that are you biggest brand cheerleaders, marketers would be able to refine their strategies to better speak to these groups. Anyway, just some interesting food for thought for today.