Beyond sentiment: The 27 things customers say about you on social networks

Social media monitoring and sentiment tracking is essential for brand managers. However, measuring sentiment solely in terms ‘positive, negative and neutral’  leaves online brand managers hungry for subtlety.

After all, the whole reason for measuring sentiment is to understand and predict people’s behavior based on the nature of their online comments.

This is why I’ve become keen on the classifications for conversation proposed by Katie Payne, CEO of KD Payne and Partners.

“There are 27 distinct types of conversation that we’ve identified,” said Payne. “Understanding the nature of the conversation is critical to knowing what to do about it.”

By combining Payne’s classification with sentiment, it is possible to get a better sense of what customers are saying about your products and service:

Since recording sentiment with this level of detail is a manual process, it may not be practical for fortune 100 companies (like my employer) to classify every message.

Nevertheless, it’s probably a good idea to periodically dig deeper to gain a deeper understanding of brand conversations.

Kudos to Katie!

Credits: Cartoon is courtesy of We Blog Cartoons.

7 Things

Ok. The WHOLE TIME I worked on this post, Miley Cyrus’s song entitled ’7 things’ was going through my head. Yes, I have daughters. As a vengeful tribute, I’ve included a parody below.

Further Reading:

• Monitoring Sentiment: Follow competitors and critics on social networks
• The real truth: What business owners need to know about social media
• Men Behaving Badly: Leverage Social Accountability to Meet New Year’s Goals
• Social Science: Your shared links are short lived on social networks