by Carol Holden*

Flickr Image: ohad

Among all of the lists of trends and predictions for the industry in 2010, as the person in charge of BurrellesLuce Media Measurement custom, Sentiment Analysis (aka tone) jumps to the top for me. Even as more social media monitoring companies add new measurement tools, the question regarding accuracy continues to linger.

In thinking about how to work with a sentiment analysis tool the analogy with online banking comes to mind. Would you continue to pay your bills online or use an ATM if you knew you lost 30 cents for every dollar you spent? Certainly 70 percent accuracy is not good enough for my money. How can it be good enough to reflect the hard earned efforts of an ongoing PR program, which ultimately comes down to money as well? How much staff time would you still need to invest in the sentiment results to make up the difference lost? And how would you pinpoint the percentage of stories that need human review or would you ultimately have to re-review everything?

Forester Principal Analyst Suresh Vital raised some interesting points involving the maturity of sentiment analysis in a recent article on Destinations.com. The most telling point: in talking with his clients, who have deployed some form of sentiment analysis, accuracy rests at about 50 percent.  “In the near term,” Vital says, “human intervention will still be necessary.”

Automated, hybrid, all-human-judgment, please share your experiences in judging the sentiment of your coverage. What is good enough and what can you afford to miss out on?

*Bio: I’ve been in the media business all of my adult life, first in newspapers before going full circle and joining BurrellesLuce, where I now direct the Media Measurement department. I’ve always enjoyed meeting and especially listening to the needs of our customers and others in the public relations and communications fields; I welcome sharing ideas through the Fresh Ideas blog. One of my professional passions is providing the type of service to a client that makes them respond, “atta girl” – inspiring our entire team to keep striving to be the best. Although I have been lucky enough to travel through much of Asia and most major U.S. cities for business or pleasure, my free time is now spent with my daughter, visiting family/friends, and of course the Jersey shore. Twitter: @domeasurement LinkedIn: Carol Holden Facebook: BurrellesLuce