I remember some years ago a University lecturer warning myself and a lecture theatre full of bleary eyed students about the perils of carrying out academic research via search engines and not putting in the leg work of good old fashioned reading. She said we would be “panning for gold in a river of mud*”. And of course she was right.

Recently I’ve found myself muttering this analogy as I’ve been researching and using several social media monitoring/research tools.  There’s no denying they can show you all manner of information, which is great, but ultimately can leave you scratching your head and thinking “so what?”. ‘Sentiment’ is a particular bee in my bonnet. As these tools are keyword driven this metric is prone to being less than accurate. IE, a post containing the terms “poor” and “rubbish” would be shown as negative sentiment, but the post could itself read: Read the rest of this entry »