Well taken comment. How can sentiment be a metric?

I was using short hand here. The recommendation would be to trend your volume of positive mentions vs. volume of negative mentions. You can do this in social media monitoring solutions such as Radian6, Scoutlabs or more traditional media monitoring products.

There is a debate about how well sentiment analysis works. After all, it is a tall order for a computer program to understand and score human language. So, if you should see a spike in negative or positive mentons you’d still have to drill-down in your social media monitoring tool to gain a sense whether there is something real going on or whether the tool has mistaken some commonly used phrase in the chatter.

Thank you for thinking through this with me!
Akin