Listening to Online WOM: A Primer

Listening to Online WOM: A Primer

In The Beginning There Was WOM...

Since the dawn of time when the first Cro-Magnon grunted "Starbucks" to his cavemates, people have talked about brands, products and services. As we started walking upright, we came to call this chatter "word-of-mouth," or more recently by it acronym WOM.

In Matt Galloway's excellent article, he asks if anyone has had any experience in using the tools offered to analyse CGM content. What strikes me is that many companies are claiming to do this and that, but what does the end-user actually find useful? We know that NLP techniques are generally very good at entity extraction (e.g. people, companies, places etc) and at identifying basic relationships (i.e. Richard Branson is the CEO of Virgin). What they are not so good at is that level of human understanding when it comes to evaluating a piece of work/article/blog post etc. For analysing 1000s of articles, they are great as a "pulse-check" or a "heads-up", but the accuracy (in terms of analysing mood/sentiment) is often a little patchy. Don't get me wrong, I'm not dissing the technology, I'm just wondering how many of bells and whistles are actually used by PR/marketing people or are they used more to say "Hey, we're an innovative company, buy our products."

As Matt states, the technology is useful for companies that generate a lot of noise and some of the techniques are very good at isolating "hot" or "emerging" topics. But how is the data used by clients? What do they do with that information? With all the bells and whistles that are available in these offerings, what are the "must have" elements? Are many clients paying through the nose for something they don't end up using (but might be fun to play with)?

I agree with Matt. Let's see some sample reports. Let's have some more case-studies about how the data was used, but more specifically, what data was used? Only then can we figure out whether we need all the "innovations", or whether PR/marketing people can still get by with the essentials.