If you are a global brand, you need global social media monitoring
Understanding online buzz is tough enough. And it becomes harder still when you add in the dimension of language.
Online discussion is increasingly gravitating to local sites in each country (or localised variants of global sites) and discussion tends to be in the local idiom. This means you need to be able to read a lot of languages to understand online discussion.
At WaveMetrix we have identified three key elements to understanding language online:
The three key elements to understanding language online
- Need for mother tongue speakers. Language used online is often informal and relies heavily on slang. In our experience only mother tongue speakers can accurately read and understand discussion in any particular language. This poses a substantial logistical challenge if you are dealing with a lot of buzz in a lot of countries
- Consistent classification across languages. You want to make sure that you classify buzz the same way across countries and languages. Unfortunately this is not always the case, as discussed here
- Consistent sentiment rating across languages. Italians are known for their emotive language and Scandinavians for saying less. How do you make sure that such cultural differences do not bias the measurement of sentiment by language or country? You need a way of measuring sentiment which depends not on the use of specific words, but on action