Last night, the world learned about Steve Jobs passing. I couldn’t possibly write anything about him that hasn’t already been said by someone else more elegantly or eloquently, nor would I attempt to do that here.  Jobs and Apple changed computing and the technology world as we know it. Simply put, he was a visionary. Because of that, his passing (and the legacy he leaves behind) got me thinking about the future of business and how social media relates.

We’re All Pioneers

When it comes to social media, we’re forging our own paths. There’s no doubt we have plenty of great leaders showing us how it could be done and maybe even how it should be done. But there’s nothing to say that you can’t do it a little differently – handle social media for your business in a way that best suits your business’ personality. Think outside the box. How would you use social media for your business if there were no one to tell you that you couldn’t do it that way? When you think about which platforms your business will focus its social media efforts around, don’t forget that there’s more to social media than just Facebook and Twitter. In other words, if your consumers or clients love video, consider those outposts as well. Then, go out and make great videos that really show people why they’d want to do business with you!

Everyone Can Contribute To the Social Enterprise

In Seth Godin’s book, “Poke the Box” he asks “When was the last time you did something for the first time?” Do you remember? It doesn’t matter if you are the Founder and CEO or the new hire. You’ve got ideas and those ideas could very well help take your business to another level. Let’s say your call center is providing great customer service, how can you do the same or better, using social media? Use your imagination, brainstorm, be creative and experiment. I’m not suggesting you throw strategy out the window – just suggesting that you should expand your horizons and keep a very open mind throughout the process.

The Future

The future of your business is unwritten. Businesses are moving toward becoming more social – shifting into social enterprises. You can ignore change, embrace change or create change. Are you going to spend your future keeping up with the competition or blazing new trails? It is really up to you.

“Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me … Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful… that’s what matters to me.” – Steve Jobs  [The Wall Street Journal, 1993]

What wonderful things will your business do, using social media?

Trish Forant is a Community Manager at Radian6. She’s a mom, a writer and she enjoys helping people connect. You can connect with her on Twitter at @Dayngr.

AMD has always been involved with their user community, so when social media came to the forefront of communication, instead of joining the conversation, this tech leader set out to evolve their in-place collaboration and engagement strategies to integrate these new communication platforms, testing the social media waters at CES in 2009.

As a leader in Internet infrastructure services, VeriSign has been helping their customers engage in trusted communication with their markets for over a decade. So when they and their agency partner, Voce Communications, decided that they needed to be paying attention to their own online reputation, they turned to Radian6 for help.

One of the most talked about capabilities of social media monitoring platforms is sentiment analysis, more specifically the automation of same. It’s a technology that’s important and can be valuable to companies’ social media analysis, but it’s critical to understand how it works, when it’s useful, and what its limitations are.

At Radian6, we’ll be publicly releasing our automated sentiment capabilities inside the platform early next week, and they’ll be immediately available to all current and new customers. As a bit of background, however, we thought we’d talk a bit about what we see as the role of automated sentiment in social media monitoring and engagement, and how Radian6 is approaching it.

What is Automated Sentiment technology, and How Does Radian6 Use It?

Automated sentiment analysis is a system for automatically determining the sentiment of a sentence or phrase. Sentiment refers to the thought or mood of a post and can be either positive, neutral or negative.

Radian6 automated sentiment reviews on-topic posts as they come in, determines the sentiment of the post at the sentence level, and aggregates a positive, negative, or neutral designation at the post level based on specified sentiment keywords and phrases. If a particular document or post touches multiple topics, sentiment can be determined for each separate topic.

Stay tuned on the Radian6 blog next week for more detail on Radian6′s automated sentiment capabilities.

What Automated Sentiment Can Help With

As a first pass, automated sentiment analysis can help streamline the workflow of processing a high volume of posts by providing preliminary determinations of sentiment for each post. Users can then follow up with review and manual adjustment as necessary. Automated sentiment also provides an initial snapshot of postive-negative-neutral ratios, and can help identify trends at a macro level such as sparklines or aggregate changes in sentiment over time.

Looking at ratios of positive to negative sentiment over time can sometimes indicate collective brand preferences as expressed online, or the overall mindset or mood of audiences. The unfiltered and unedited nature of the opinions expressed on the social web and tracked through sentiment analysis can sometimes offer a more realistic, less clinical view of how customers and communities are responding to companies and brands.

Armed with this high level analysis and trend information, Radian6 users can better craft engagement strategy, understand hot button issues and topics around their brand, and reach out to their customers informed about the pulse of opinion about the company and it’s work.

Automated Sentiment and The Human Factor

Sentiment analysis, whether automated or manual, is a subjective process and always needs to be considered in the context of business goals.
What’s read as positive for one person or in one context might be considered neutral for another, so businesses need to consider and outline criteria for positive, negative, and neutral definitions based on their goals for online presence and engagement.

In addition, the complexity and nuance of the English language combined with available technologies for text analytics means that sentiment analysis cannot currently achieve 100% accuracy. In fact, accuracy rates across sentiment analysis engines can be highly variable, as the criteria to define an “accurate” sentiment determination is also somewhat dependent upon human interpretation and context.

There will always be a need for human review and involvement to verify automated results, and ensure that sentiment levels are tagged within the context of individual and unique business goals and agreed upon criteria.

For More on Radian6 Sentiment Analysis…

Stay tuned for a post early next week with some additional detail about the technical features of Radian6′s automated sentiment, and information on how to set it up inside your Radian6 dashboard. And as always, if you have questions or feedback for our team regarding this or any other feature, we’d welcome your input and conversation.

Image by richkidsunite