Business Blogging

My latest post on the Text 100 blog looks at the spoof BP Global PR Twitter profile that satirises BP’s handling of the recent natural disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. It’s a very funny parody but, like all comms professionals, I shouldn’t laugh too much because there’s no telling when it might be one of my clients on the receiving end of this kind of scathing satire.

My advice – in most cases it’s just as well to take the joke with good grace and look at what you can learn from the experience. Trying to close a parody imitator down will often result in a nasty backlash and add flames to the fire.

This week I’ve got a post over at Reputation Online on the current state of the social media monitoring market. I’ve spent a lot of time trying out the different services over the past year and I’m not massively impressed with the tools on offer. Ultimately, the main problem for me is the quality of the search results in these tools; most of them offer only a very limited view of your brand on the internet, and often the results are full of spam.

The automated sentiment analysis feature that most of these tools offer is little more than a gimmick – the technology is currently so inaccurate as to be practically useless. Prices vary wildly and there’s often not much difference between high and low end products.

Of course, social media is a hot topic right now, and buying a big name monitoring tool is a great way to show your boss that you’re on the ball, especially if it churns out some nice looking reports and nobody asks too many questions about the quality of data those reports are based on.