Social Sentiment – a new currency?

…You Are Worth about 50 “Sents”.
Social Sentiment, a new currency?

The short answer is: yes. As companies continue to embrace social, they are going to look for numbers, numbers and more numbers. So, the social media department/girl/guy/team is going to start looking for these numbers and other bits of content to fill up their reports.

In a galaxy not so far away…

Also, there are going to be teams of people who make social media monitoring platforms who are going to take this idea of “social sentiment” and run with it. They’ll write lines and lines of code analyzing language and context of certain words (is “stupid” next to “our company” and is it within 5 words of our company’s name?). These lines of code will produce a data set to which people will begin to (seemingly arbitrarily) assign a monetary value. This data set will be broken up evenly and every mention/tweet/user will be assigned a generic value. However, this will be just the beginning.

Soon after (if this already doesn’t exist) individuals will have their public social activity analyzed and assigned a value – which is taking it a step further than the aforementioned collective social sentiment. These measurements will take into account trends of public social sentiment per user (is this person a career complainer? do they praise as well as much as they complain? Are they silent? Is their tone neutral?) – and also amount of activity and of course reach (what platforms are they on? where are they most active? what is their engagement level like? are they “influential”?). Based on these values, a person will be assigned a specific value – non-generic.

Wait? Doesn’t Klout exist already?

Well, Klout does this… sort of… Klout doesn’t measure your sentiment or common tone. Also, your “worth” is the same to everyone who looks at that score. But that’s not really how it works is it? I’m a lifelong +Coca-Cola fan ( I was born in Georgia, not like I even have to justify being a Coke fan) – so chances are I’m going to be worth more to Coke than I am to Pepsi as a social consumer especially regarding “sentiment”(don’t worry +Pepsi , I drink tons of Mountain Dew). And why? Well, I talk about Coke more and even might bash Pepsi for their anti-Coke commercials.

How many “Sents” are you worth?”

Is this strange to you? The astute individual might say, “well you’re a number anyway even before these new-fangled social apparatuses began to appear – just get used to it”. That may be true… but before you might have just been representative of an income level… an age group… a gender, perhaps. However, there is a new demographic arena to take into account… what is it going to be called? What do you think your “worth” is to these companies? Do you ignore, as a consumer, the talk about individual consumer worth because it is perhaps dehumanizing – or is it something you think about without shivering?

Has anyone read any informative articles about this – if so – please post links in the comments!