Over the past few weeks, much of the online conversation about social media monitoring has centered around the importance of pairing automated analysis with human expertise. Two ideas in particular caught our eye: First, humans should participate in data filtering to ensure accuracy and relevance. Second, as Jason Falls stated on Social Media Explorer, humans are needed to interpret and correctly utilize the insights that monitoring tools can provide.

While we agree with that second idea and offer consulting services of our own (as well as have excellent partners that offer strategic services), we’d like to  highlight the first point – that humans are necessary to filter out irrelevant data – with some analysis we’ve done about the conversation surrounding the new Bing search engine. Our algorithm incorporates training by humans for both sentiment and relevance, allowing us to catch things like the following two tweets:

Even though the first tweet could have been recognized by a simple English language filter, the second one contains a common misspelling of the word “being” that a computer would be hard-pressed to identify as such.

Indeed, a post by Marshall Sponder over at webmetricsguru.com makes the point that sentiment analysis is best done by people. At the Sentiment Analysis Symposium, he used several popular fully automated social media monitoring tools to study the conversation about Social Media Week, and obtained drastically different results from each tool.

Our algorithm is different in that it is neither keyword based nor based on natural language processing  – rather, the user teaches the algorithm to replicate human judgment, achieving a true “marriage between man and machine” – something that Social Media Today describes as social media monitoring at its best.

It’s no secret that the Crimson Hexagon office is full of nerds and beer lovers. In between games of Magic: The Gathering after work, conversation frequently drifts toward our favorite beer styles, beer names, and beer recipes. Naturally, I thought it would be fun to combine our interests and use our powerful (and nerdy!) social [...]

Today, Twitter announced Promoted Tweets, which will use users’ searches to determine targeted, sponsored Tweets to display at the top of their search results page. While on the surface the new advertising platform seems nearly identical to Google’s AdWords, Twitter is emphasizing the organic nature of Promoted Tweets as well as the high level of [...]

Recently, Nestle has been under fire from tech-savvy environmentalists over its use of palm oil in Kit Kat bars. On March 17th, Greenpeace released a report about Nestle’s palm oil use, staged a protest outside company headquarters, and posted a negative video on YouTube (not for the faint of heart), each asserting that Nestle bought [...]

President Obama just signed into law a universal healthcare bill modeled, in some respects, on the healthcare system that we have here in Massachusetts. Regardless of how they feel, people agree with Joe Biden that it will have massive ramifications for the economy and well-being of the American people for decades.
Given the intense emotions that [...]

I’m having a great time here in Austin representing Crimson Hexagon to the wonderfully nerdy SXSW-Interactive masses. We are part of the Porter Novelli tent that just announced their upcoming social media platform, which will combine our tool along with the impressive influencer analysis from our friends at Traackr and workflow from Spredfast to fully [...]

We’ve been keeping an eye on reactions to the recent State of the Union address, and the potential repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT) remains a hot topic.  Over the next few months, we’ll be using our technology to track what people are saying about DADT on blogs and forums as this story develops.

Right [...]

While not owning a car is often frustrating, at times it has its advantages in Boston: no digging snow out from around tires, no fighting crowds for parking, and I don’t have to worry about the sticky accelerator pedal in my Toyota sending me to a fiery death. The recent Toyota recall has caused quite [...]

It’s fair to say we were pleased when CNN aired our analysis of Twitter’s reaction to the State of the Union address.
We were thrilled when the Huffington Post quoted CNN SVP David Bohrman as saying, “This is light-years beyond what we’ve done”
So imagine our delight when Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show picked up the story [...]

Last night, Crimson Hexagon’s analysis of over 200,000 tweets pertaining to the State of the Union Address was featured on CNN’s post-speech coverage. Broken down state by state, our technology helped John King and Wolf Blitzer report in real-time what people on Twitter thought of President Obama’s speech. We are very excited about our new [...]