Back from a yummy lunch, we listened to Gary Angel from Semphonics talk about analytic dashboards incorporating social media statistics. Payday loans online. As with any analytics, tools drive the data.  The heritage of social media analytic tools is the basic assumption that there’s a person behind each interacti0n and you’re looking at the individual responses, not the top line numbers.  A lot of the existing tools don’t export the data, so often the dashboards are a compilation from many tools. Gary shared some actual reports showing the reach of a conversation.  When looking at data, you have to remember the three C’s of analysis.

1. Culling
2. Classification
   1. Topic, sentiment, type, sites, etc.
3. Context

If you insist on sentiment analysis, do it manually.  There’s nothing worse than presenting an incorrect analysis to the CEO of posts that are misclassified since automatic tools don’t read sarcasm, etc.

Next up, Jennifer Neeley Lindsay from Blog Talk Radio talked about the tools that the larger tech companies work.  According to Nielsen, one of the central concerns of CEOs today is using a “listening program” efficiently and effectively.  Sometimes the CEOs aren’t looking at the right data – looking at top level mentions but not individual responses.  They feel out of control and like there’s no KPIs to measure the success with.  Jennifer shared great case studies from her time working with small-medium business development projects with Microsoft.  There can be conflicting goals, so it’s important to analyze what you’re doing and have clearly defined goals once you’ve decided which goal wins.

Before the next break, the first panel of the day rolls out.  The panelists were Chase McMichael from InifiniGraph and David Rogers from Symantec, with Timothy Jordan back to moderate.  It was definitely established that normal business goals are not the same as social media goals.  It’s not as measurable, so it’s an epic battle.  Brands participating in social media need to be personable and like-able with the communities and conversations they’re attempting to cultivate.  Remember that a banner ad on a social media site is NOT participating in social media, it’s still a banner ad.

All of the slides from today’s event are available on the Influence People Slideshare page.

Trisha Lyn Fawver is a blogger at TrishaLyn.com and works as the client services specialist at For Me To Coupon, an automated affiliate coupon feed.