I recently read on Nathan Gilliatt’s blog (great blog!) about the “The Importance of the Analyst” and felt compelled to leave a comment to add to the conversation and also to write this short post to share.
An analyst (whether internally from the client, from the agency/consultant or from the service provider) has to have the right tools and skills to extract the relevant insights from the mountain of data.
They would probably have to deal with the following:
- To determine relevancy of conversations (e.g. a “card” mentioned in the finance context might mean credit card but a “card” mentioned in an IT hardware context might mean “video or sound card”)
- To determine sarcastic posts, e.g. “Great 3G phone that has 30min battery life!”
- To configure, maintain and train the system. The usual saying of “rubbish in, rubbish out”. The analyst has to make sure that the keywords and other parameters are well configured to suit the intended goal of the listening process.
Not an easy task in any measure (no pun intended). The complication piles up when the client has to deal with multiple languages, geographic locations, local nuances, etc.
Whoever is looking for a truly global/regional solution has to consider these questions and to determine if there are these resources in place before committing into any “social media strategy” in the long run.
Kelly Choo
Co-founder & Product Development Director
