Why is it difficult to understand buzz?
Understanding what people say about you online is tougher than you might think. It entails dealing with vast volumes of buzz scattered across all sorts of sites.
But, it's not just a case of quantity. Making sense of buzz is very much a matter of being able to assess the quality of what's being said.
At WaveMetrix we summarize the difficulties involved in buzz research as the five challenges of understanding social media:
The five challenges of understanding social media:
- 1. Volume: There are probably thousands, tens of thousands or sometimes millions of posts about your product, service or brand online. Add in competitors and it will be even more. How do you cover it all?
- 2. Topics: You need to know how much people talk, but more importantly still, you need to know what they talk about. This is perhaps the toughest challenge of all. How do you understand all the discussion out there and analyze it so you can work out what really matters to people?
- 3. Sentiment: You want to know how people feel about you, but measuring sentiment is not easy. Slang and style vary. Irony and sarcasm confound easy categorization. Multiple languages make consistency hard. How do you score it all accurately and consistently?
- 4. Languages: Online discussion spans every language; if you are global then so is discussion about you. How can you read and understand it all? How can you ensure data from one country is measured the same way as any other?
- 5. Sources: Social media is a complex landscape, with many different types of sources. You want to make sure you cover them all, reliably. But how do you cover everything from Facebook to Twitter and from forums to review sites and blogs?
At WaveMetrix we have been working hard to address the five challenges of understanding social media since we first started out back in 2003. Please visit our methodology section to find out more.
To learn more about the five challenges of understanding social media: