This piece is a continuation of my previous article on evaluation http://knowpublicrelations.blogspot.in/2012/09/media-evaluation-or-stakeholder.html. It focuses on the evaluation of the the social media. The evaluation of the 'mention' of your organisation, products, brands etc. To know how these evaluations can be done, one has to first understand what we are analysing on the web.
On the web, more specifically on the social media, we are essentially analysing sentiments. Sentiments is "analysis of emotion in messages". Sentiments are not the same as feelings, and their use interchangeably has also become extinct in regular use or scientifically speaking - (www.cyberemotions.eu)
Sentiment analysis helps understand impact of negative emotions online http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19821-flaming-drives-online-social-networks.html or it also helps, like in this article, where social and traditional media are compared on http://www.journalism.org/commentary_backgrounder/how_social_and_traditional_media_differ_their_treatment_conventions_and_beyo
Some of the links which I found are given below which help you to examine sentiments. These links will give a broad idea on what is being spoken about the client.
So we are not studying the complete message as a whole here but rather the emotion conveyed in them. To begin with, you can try Social Mention http://www.socialmention.com/ which gives a free detail analysis of the client on the cyberspace.
There are sites that also offer free softwares to analyze content about your client. This one is used extensively, Sentistrength http://sentistrength.wlv.ac.uk/ as you will read about it on the link provided. It examines texts within contexts. This link http://smm.streamcrab.com/ searches for all views on twitter. Though Twitter also has its on tools.
The above links to begin with can help PRites both practitioners and students to understand emotions on the web better.
Do share your views and links to look more deeper into this area.
