We have to give credit to the Government for wanting to check the pulse of the nation. Newspaper reports claimed that a firm was hired to gauge feedback on what is the largest budget spent by any Government. But what is involved in monitoring or measuring? How would we know that an accurate sense of the nation’s feelings is had?

The very first thing to do is identify the audience to be measured. Which audiences are the most important to your outcome? There are different response rates from different people and a measurement one has to be careful not to simply check those who are easiest to check on. Social media use may appear to be an easy to measure media but it is populated by a particular age group and more by women than men. This has to be factored into the equation before the results can be claimed as projectable onto the national picture.

In social media, persons of different political stripes post material. The rabid, and therefore the most likely to be active, posters have to be treated differently from the average Jackie- in- the- street.  What were the criteria used to separate these posters so as to get a ‘real’ feeling of sentiment?

Another issue is one of non-response and how does the measurement analysis handle this? Some users may not post any material about the subject. What does that mean? How is that to be interpreted? What does silence mean? The most significant issue in dealing with any measurement is what proportion of users is posting? How do you interpret the proportion? Is it sufficiently high enough to make a true assessment of social media opinion relative to your objective?

Assume that you get passed these hurdles, the next step will be your measurement tool. How are you going measure? The newspaper article indicates that the tool was specific keyword searches. Well we do not have to go further on this element since our experience for searches will inform us of the potential pitfalls in this approach.

The final step is the interpretation of the data. This particular assessment is largely a qualitative one in nature then an attempt to count positive and negative responses. There were samples of the feedback quoted and it shows the difficulty in categorizing a response. One of the ‘positive’ could be a ‘neutral’ and one of the ‘neutral’ could be a ‘negative’. So coding the responses is a crucial step to accuracy.

We just have to know how to measure before we begin to measure. Unfortunately many persons believe that it is easy and some go as far as to become experts because they can use Survey Monkey but that may end up with our surveys showing us that we are……. Have a more informed day and plan your measurements well or else leave it to the experts. Give us a call.

Written by Noble Philip, Chairman. January 23rd, 2015