This document discusses the flaws in current methods for determining whether online posts and comments are from friends, foes, or neutrals of a company. It argues that sentiment analysis is incomplete because it fails to consider context, timeliness of posts, and importance of influencers. The document proposes building a "Social Rank" system like Google's PageRank to identify influential voices in a company's market and guide more effective marketing strategies.

1. Who’s with ME?!
I’ve always wondered if you could tell who was with your company or against it
on-line. Based on the tools I’ve used and seen it’s apparent that most of the results
are more than just incomplete they are plain garbage.
FRIEND/FOE/NEUTRAL
The notion of Friend/Foe and Neutral is flawed at its core and how they are
derived. I’ve read the on-line musings of dozens of so called experts on the topic of
sentiment analysis; three core items strike me;
1. It’s very difficult to determine the intent of language with out the proper
context. The example I love is in the retail skateboard industry- where “bad”
equals good. Having a dictionary that denotes the key language used is critical to
deciphering meaning.
2. It is time consuming to determine how long ago a post for or against your
firm occurred. Leaving your team with many hours of research to identify the hot
areas in your market place around the current topics.
3. Not all posts and comments are created equal. Frequency and volume
(place post was made) of a post should not be the main determinants as to whether
a person carries weight at the end of the day.
ADDED DIMENSIONS

2. Now, if we include the added dimensions of company size, geo and vertical it’s
nearly impossible to identify who really matters in any market place. So based on
what I’ve seen big companies rely on Analysts and the middle market firms create
their own teams of listeners and SMB-small firms blog into oblivion hoping they
make some waves to impact their overall market.
Wouldn’t the world of marketing and influence be a better place if we could not
only determine who was important but how they are important relative to our
competitors and us?
If we look at how Google leveraged Page Rank and the power of crowd sourcing-
link votes- to determine what websites to serve up relative to the search string
entered on its site that dramatically improved the relevant sites on the SERP.
SOCIAL RANK
In our case building a vertically driven Social Rank would offer the same power
and insights into who matters in the marketplace we are competing in and who we
should really listen to as marketers as well as who we should direct our marketing
dollars towards as we look to influence the influencers.
With a clear direction of whom to market at now the attention is focused on what
to say more than where are they located. This distinction allows you double and
potentially triple the effectiveness of your digital spend now that we know who
matters.
More on this topic next week…I will jump into how building a people database
around influence will change how on-line marketers approach their digital budgets.
Good hunting….hope to see you on-line soon,
Jim

3. Posted in: Influencer Marketing