Business Blogging

If you’re looking for a good, free tool to monitor brand mentions in social media, let me hook you up with SocialMention. As well as providing you with real-time search results from a range of social media sources, the site offers on-the-fly sentiment analysis. I’ve looked at several sentiment analysis tools over the years, and in my opinion they’re all next to useless – natural language processing technology just isn’t good enough to do the job yet. But that doesn’t stop people trying to sell sentiment analysis tools to technically illiterate PR people who probably aren’t going to pay too much attention to how well it’s working – so long as the system outputs some nice charts they can show their boss.

That said, SocialMention’s sentiment analysis seems to be as good as you’re likely to find at present, and it’s completely free. The site also provides email alerts, which I’m sure a lot of people will find useful.

There are a couple of caveats: I’ve found the site to be quite flaky at times and I presume it’s still very much under development, so I wouldn’t recommend relying on it for anything critical. Secondly, I don’t know what SocialMention’s business plan is, but I imagine that if it’s going to survive the site will need to start charging for premium reporting tools or something along those lines – so don’t expect it to stay free forever.

Regardless, I think it’s a great site, so I hope they manage to fix the reliability issues and find a way for it to survive as an ongoing service.