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In social media how do brands monitor for sarcasm?

Many services try to mine social media for sentiment about brands. But it's not easy...
Written by Tom Foremski, Contributor
I hate Ticketmaster. [When web services go bad: Ticketmaster's outrageous tax on culture - it harms society | Tom Foremski: IMHO | ZDNet.com]

I Tweeted yesterday about a New York Times article:

"I hate Ticketmaster - "Ticketmaster Settles With F.T.C. Over Springsteen Tickets" http://nyti.ms/aUZMHo"

I got a response from a service called Amplicate, which pulls together positive and negative comments about brands. It made a page called Ticketmaster Rocks, where it collected supposedly positive Tweets about Ticketmaster, and one called Ticketmaster Sucks, where it collected negative Tweets.

But if you look at the Ticketmaster Rocks page, most are negative. The service cannot distinguish sarcasm. Take a look:

Sarcastic

Sarcastic

I'm sure this is common to many other social media brand monitoring services. Which goes to show that they aren't much use if you have to have humans monitor the brands. I'm going to Tweet "I love #Amplicate - it is so good at understanding sarcasm!" Let's see which page it ends up on, Rocks or Sucks.


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