Listening 49 In fact there's only one thing worse than having no information and that's having the wrong information. As the plethora of online social listening tools continues to increase, it's worth looking at more than just price ­ approach to data, scale of data and the quality of the data analysis provided are key elements. Buying in a cheap system and then acting on bad data will be more expensive in the long run than investing in a machine-plus-human solution now. With human involvement (from people who understand the business and what to look for), machines can learn over time; with no human sense checking, machine-only sentiment analysis may not ever get to the point where it can be truly reliable and useful. The complex nature of data cleansing should not act as a discouragement to using listening, though, and listening can be applied in a number of areas. From insight for product design and strategy, to identifying the voices around a brand, to risk management, to acting as a customer service and crisis management solution (we'll look at responding in Chapter 9), to measurement (covered in Chapter 10),