Buzz Tells You Where and What—Audience Research Tells You How and Why

Buzz-monitoring tools can tell you where the buzz is happening. Most of the enterprise-level buzz-monitoring tools can also tell you what that buzz is saying, and some tools even provide a context or sentiment (sentiment analysis) regarding the record they bring back, ranking it as positive, neutral, or negative. However, sentiment analysis is still in its infancy. It’s really tough for computers to automatically rank things as positive, negative, or neutral when so many words and phrases can have more than one meaning.

For example, consider the word spongy. If your buzz-monitoring software returned a few records using the word spongy to describe your product, this could be a bad descriptor if your company specializes in installing brakes. However, if your company is a bakery, the term spongy could be a real compliment. In both cases, the buzz-monitoring software likely would have a tough time accurately categorizing the sentiment of the term spongy and might classify those records as “neutral.” This proves that it’s still important to research your audience to understand what they are truly saying.