2016-02-02

There are many tools available to evaluate the impact of your marketing campaigns. Everyone has Google Analytics, an email tracking tool and some sort of media monitoring tool.

In 2016, a tool to help you understand the sentiment of your mentions has become necessary; simply put, as social media's importance grows understanding the tone and sentiment of the social conversation is vital.

In a past blog, we examined the how of sentiment calculation but let's talk about the why you should hone in on your consumers' feelings from the first point of promotion to the end of the customer's journey.



Imagine you log in to your brand's twitter account and see that overnight you had a surge of social media hits. You do some digging to see what the tweets and posts are saying about you. It's easy for you to figure out how much love and hate you received with a handful of tweets. But how many can you manually categorize?

If you have to look at a sizable sample of mentions it's impossible to manually decipher if they are in favor of your brand, against it, or neutral. You have to open up each one. You have to read them through. You have to figure out if there's something you should do to combat the negative media. That's a lot of time and work on your part.

With a sentiment analysis tool you'll be able to see at a glance the positive and negative sentiment values of each article, TV mention and social media post. Once your social media is at scale, it's vital to quantify the sentiment of all the posts and trends.

Brand Reputation Management via Sentiment

The main purpose of tracking sentiment is to quantify the impression your brand is leaving on your leads, consumers and customers. Are you delighting your customers or ruining your company's good name?

Companies use hashtags on their ads to encourage Twitter engagements. When consumers use those tags, they are contributing to the media conversation around your campaign and brand. But you want to know if the messaging you intended your audience to engage in is helping or hurting you.

It's also ok for brands to shake things up every now and then. Risks help you make better predictions for audience behavior. Sentiment analysis can tell you if the experiments paid off or caused a new crisis to manage.

A Social Media Risk That Paid Off

Dollar Shave Club is a company that packages shaving necessities and sends them to men's doorsteps. Since their audience is male-centric, they specifically targeted the gay male audience with an ad geared for Valentine's Day.



With sentiment analysis, its clear to see that this ad did well and gave a positive message to DSC's clients that was well received.

Are people really listening to my promotions?

All the time.

Think about how the average person is targeted during their day; wake-up, coffee, morning news, radio on the way to work, potentially some internet radio at work, social media fix several times throughout the day, radio on the way to the gym, several TV screens while working out, radio back on the ride home and television watching and social media and web surfing from the moment they've walked in the door until the moment they go to bed.

That is incredible reach! But be aware that you have to stand out from the rest by putting your best foot forward. Give something your audience will enjoy and give you great media feedback.

If it's bad feedback, act accordingly. Engage with your audience to make it right again. But it all begins with tracking those sentiment scores.

But how relevant will sentiment be in the future?

In one word - extremely.

We all know that media is consumed on multiple screens and at the same time. While your viewers are watching your TV commercials, they're also on their laptops, tablets and smartphones scrolling on their social sites willing to tweet or post whatever is on their minds within seconds.

As long as people interact with the content you're putting out to them, there will be pushback or praise. As social media continues to saturate society sentiment sets the stage for success.

Sentiment Scores with Media Intelligence

iQ media's sentiment is based off of an algorithm that focuses on the context of your mention. Not just the amount of positive words vs. the amount of negative, like the previous generation of media intelligence suites were able to do.

Further, iQ is able to filter out the noise. If there is someone who hatefully tweets often, you can recognize their Twitter handle and remove it from future reporting. Hashtags can be blocked, too.

Then the data allows you to identify the genuine people with a strong or weak sentiment score and interact with them to alleviate their negativity or reward their evangelism.


The language is also customizable. For example: in Boston, the word "wicked" is intended for a positive connotation. However, in most places the word "wicked" has a negative value. With a tool like iQ media's one can alter sentiment scores so whenever "wicked" is used, it will have a positive value.

Boston: "That concert last night was wicked hardcore!" - POSITIVE

Philadelphia: "That kid should be punished for his wicked behavior." - NEGATIVE

Sentiment analysis is just one of the five reasons you need true media intelligence.

Click to the other four reasons media intelligence can enhance your marketing.

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