A Fool With A Tool Is Still A Fool
by JohnSheridan
“Foundations of Listening” is the new book from The Advertising Research Foundation (ARF), and it was recently covered in the influential Advertising Age. What the ARF found, is that despite the wealth of online opinion or “buzz”, and the growing basket of tools available to monitor such, neither is really that valuable.
So you can set up the fanciest tools available, but it doesn’t replace, or as the ARF found, even reflect what is actually in most peoples’ minds. Tools won’t give you “the answer”.
Any of us in social media have observed several ‘bubbles’ over the past few years, or the latest shiny object from industry pundits. Micro-blogging, popularity rankings, personal presence, ROI, etiquette, you-name-it have all become the must have/do’s at one time or another. Of course, “the conversation” has been one of them, which in turn, spawned the condescending phrase “you have to join the conversation”.
As a result, techniques and tools now flood the market to fill the monitoring need. But interpretation of this online “ocean of opinion”, as Advertising Age puts it, has some, but limited value.
According to “The Influentials” from the Kellar Fay Group, about 90% of the conversation and opinion, or word-of-mouth, concerning any brand is offline. And, the correlation difficulty is that of that remaining 10%, 66% of offline opinions and online opinions just don’t match up.
The second problem, of course, is any tool’s ability to accurately determine sentiment. The best any tool can do is roughly 50% accuracy. Flip a coin and you’ll be just as accurate as any monitoring software.
Tools do have a place in the online monitoring world, especially as early-warning systems, and also perhaps for internal functions such as legal and HR. But tools, Advertising Age reports, cannot replace talking to people directly through such old-fashioned methods like surveys.
Imagine that. You still have to talk to people.
The lesson here is that there are still no short cuts. The tools are good at what they do, but they cannot, (yet) do the work for you. They provide data, and in some cases, information.
Knowledge is still your job.
