Conversations that steer opinion, driven by the power of your social network.

Online buzz.

Sentiment measurement: what do people feel about your brand, as well as ‘say’ about it?

All very sensible discussions (nay, conversations) for the PR industry to be having as practices modernise and media digitises. Many are involved in the quest to make the broader remit of PR, and in particular the value of social media engagement, more commercially tangible. To apply science, for once, to the way PR is measured.

Yewd fink dats cool. Nuffink cd be fuva frm da troof, p’raps.

Coz, like, it’s like that some people, yeah, aren’t like too understandin’ in how dey’s talkin’ an’ that, innit, d’ya knowaddamean?

For me, social media’s huge power to the PR person is that it can digitise word-of-mouth influence, and that can have (if we get all of this right) a measurable, commercial impact on brand reputation. Yet we don’t seem to have considered that many of the people we hope will ‘engage in conversations around the brand’ are barely able to hold a conversation in the real world.

How can you measure sentiment, and begin to gauge its impact on brand reputation, when you don’t understand what someone is saying?

Sarcasm may be a poisoning factor in the quest for greater sophistication in social media measurement. Illiteracy (and by that I refer to the inability of people to speak – and, in the case of social media, type – clear English) may simply render measurement models impotent for certain digitised conversations.

You wince in the street when you hear strangers speaking such poor English that you want to slap them? You don’t understand what the kids are saying? Think yourself lucky you’re not having to read their writing.

Innit.