Listening in on Online Conversations: Measuring Brand Sentiment with Social Media Published with Professor Wendy Moe of the University of Maryland, and Professor David Schweidel of the University of Wisconsin
With the proliferation of social media, questions have begun to emerge about its role in firms’ marketing research programs. In this research, we investigate the potential to “listen in” on social media conversations as a means of inferring brand sentiment or customer satisfaction. Our analysis employs data collected from multiple website domains, spanning a variety of online venue formats to which social media comments may be contributed. We demonstrate how factors relating to the focus of social media comments and the venue to which they have been contributed can be explicitly modeled in an effort to derive a measure of online brand sentiment. Our proposed approach provides an adjusted brand sentiment metric that is highly correlated with the results of an offline brand tracking survey. This is in stark contrast to the virtually non-existent correlation between an average sentiment measure derived by aggregating across all social media comments and the same offline tracking survey. We discuss the implications of our findings for practitioners considering social media as a potential research tool.
June 29, 2011

When Can You Say, "We Have a Social Media Strategy!" A checklist for leaders when defining or assessing their social media strategy. Read the full description and download the white paper.
2011

Leveraging Social Intelligence to Drive Business Results (Listening 2.0) My team at Converseon published this white paper to explain how the limitations of existing social listening tools make it difficult for enterprises to pursue business objectives in social media, and then we explain how new solutions are emerging to help large organizations overcome those challenges. Read the full description and download the white paper.
November 17, 2010

Social Media Policies That Make a Difference The IABC published an article by Chris Boudreaux in their CW Bulletin online newsletter, explaining how organizations can create social media policies that make a difference.
October 12, 2010

Business Week, MSN, TheStreet.com, Social Media Biz, Money Central Chris Boudreaux and Joe Hughes of Accenture published an article describing the technologies that organizations can use to effectively monitor social media and integrate their listening into customer service and support -- at scale
March 25, 2010