I posted earlier in the year about some madness from the Newspaper Licensing Authority who are proposing to charge agencies a fee for sending urls to clients.
Fair revenues for publishers is just fair; but having my arm twisted up my back by a dying industry and their army of lawyers…that I do not like.
Lis Anderson from Corixa has an interesting update on this story: NLA vs PRCA on charging for weblinks – round two : PR Bristol (Thanks to Caroline at Bristol Media for the link
I’ve been arguing for a while that some marketers massively over-rate twitter when trying to measure on-line opinion. A majority of the “social media monitoring tools” put far too much emphasis on twitter in my opinion; and now two press release from Hitwise strongly support my argument.
To summarise, I feel that focusing on twitter ends up creating a very bad sample for any kind of opinion research, practically ignoring the effect of Facebook, Beebo, Myspace, Youtube, Search engines, News sites, Email, Blogs, Forums, Instant messaging, and all the millions of other websites on-line.
What is more, I believe that focusing on twitter so strongly is what throws twitter’s collective opinion out of line with the rest of the internet. Online marketers going to twitter to measure internet opinion is like a market research team only inviting people who work for market research companies to give feedback on a product.
The US FTC recently updated their guidelines on endorsements and testimonials, bringing in specific examples regarding bloggers who are endorsing a product as part of an advertising campaign.
The guidelines were last updated in 1980, and it appears they wanted to clarify the implications to online advertising.
An example from the updated guidelines:
The advertiser requests that a blogger try a new body lotion and write a review of the product on her blog. Although the advertiser does not make any specific claims about the lotion’s ability to cure skin conditions and the blogger does not ask the advertiser whether there is substantiation for the claim, in her review the blogger writes
that the lotion cures eczema and recommends the product to her blog readers who suffer from this condition. The advertiser is subject to liability for misleading or unsubstantiated representations made through the blogger’s endorsement. The blogger also is subject to liability for misleading or unsubstantiated representations made in the course of her endorsement. The blogger is also liable if she fails to disclose clearly and conspicuously that she is being paid for her services.In order to limit its potential liability, the advertiser should ensure that the advertising service provides guidance and training to its bloggers concerning the need to ensure that statements they make are truthful and substantiated. The advertiser should also monitor bloggers who are being paid to promote its products and take steps necessary to halt the continued publication of deceptive representations when they are discovered.
According to the Wall Street Journal,
Regulators say they haven’t seen a wave of abuses involving endorsements by bloggers but wanted to establish clear rules to prevent any problems in the future.
The FTC announcement can be read here, where you can also find the full FTC guidelines.
This video is a great example of fun, interactive and social design. Interesting experiment too!
Pithy comment from Adam Tinworth:
Officially bored of the phrase “social media” now. I’m just going to call it “media” and everything else can be “anti-social media”.
I’ve been researching sentiment analysis, and I think I’ve found pieces to suit a range of tastes and interests.
First the notes from a 2008 talk given by Lillan Lee from Cornell University. Lee’s topic is “…the flood of interest in: sentiment analysis, opinion mining, and the computational treatment of subjective language.”
This is a good ‘who, what, why, how’, featuring:
Meanwhile, the epicly-named Dirk Shaw has a blog post from July 2009 asking Sentiment analysis, How much is good enough?. It’s a short post explaining the basic differences between manual and automated sentiment analysis.
In a post from June 2009, Irfan Kamal describes the approaches Ogilvy PR are taking to make sentiment analysis work for clients.
The Ogilvy post is useful in one respect because it shows the debate is still fledgling and the possibilities are wide open.
In another respect it helps illustrate that the people-or-software-or-both question of classifying sentiment is only one dimension of the problem. Sentiment analysis has to actually be of value to the people using the results.
In my view, the most useful output would be actionable insight, i.e. information that is directly useful for making decisions. That comes with a health-warning though: if we’re to make decisions on the basis of data, we had better be sure the data is completely valid, and leads to accurate conclusions.
It’s not clear yet that sentiment analysis will be able to deliver in such a concrete way, and at the level, for example, of government policy, sentiment data will find a place, but should be treated with healthy caution.
Marta Strickland has a post on these issues from September 2009. Focussing on product reviews, she identifies Five Reasons Sentiment Analysis Won’t Ever Be Enough, and concludes “What are we really trying to decide with this data? And are we asking the right questions?”
So it it hopeless then? Is sentiment analysis a turkey? Absolutely not. Asking critical questions absolutely indicates that smart people are taking sentiment analysis seriously, and figuring out how best to do it and how best to use it.
Team Rubber has a working model for how we want to use sentiment analysis – for both our advertising and policy-making work. We’re evolving the model on the basis of trials, and we’re asking ourselves hard questions about how sentiment analysis can be valuable for our clients.
Enough about that (but more in future). Meanwhile, I’ll wrap up with a piece from each of the manual and automated perspectives. Nathan Gilliat has a September 2009 post on Scaling Human Analysis, while an April 2008 paper from Google discusses software approaches for Building a Sentiment Summarizer. Enjoy.
Recently some silliness was going on in one of my favourite web forums. Toys were thrown from prams, names were being called, it was all very exciting, but only for drama whores, so being community-minded I went looking for something about internet dramas to remind people to stop with the unacceptable behaviour.
Along the way I found this chart, which is fun, probably just about accurate, and dovetails into an ongoing debate / development project / rolling bunfight we’re having about tracking and measuring opinion.
Found via Skeptobot: Comic #01 – Internet Drama
The chart is drawn as a bell curve. Can it be replotted as a power law?
BBC NEWS | Technology | Video screens hit paper magazines
(Posting stories found on the front page of BBC News may not be the most insightful or inspired blogging, but I found this story interesting.)
I don’t reccomend trying this for real, but for the purposes of this Saatchi & Saatchi New Directors Showcase call-for-entries, it’s rather jovial:
