While battling a slightly cynical approach to ‘buzz monitoring’ (a definite throwback to the low rate of consistency and extremely high price of many press monitoring companies we’ve dealt with in the past), we were taken through a demo of Radian6 yesterday.

We’d heard about the service from the legendary Kerry ‘at Dell’ during her session at an NMALive event, tweeted about it, and had a response within 10 minutes. Any business that practices what it preaches to that extent (this also happened a second time recently on Twitter, so knew it wasn’t a fluke) – deserves a look.

The system itself has a great UI and provides some real insight, however, what was really interesting was the news that they’d be starting to track Facebook’s public discussion board content – which is part of the ‘Groups’ section.

Facebook data has been closed for monitoring and protected by very strict terms of service for some time now, and though it’s still very much a ‘walled garden’, this opens the door slightly to allow brands to track conversations deemed as ‘public’.

Following the points made in our piece last week about ranking sites (that it’s just a small amount of people doing all the talking, so the results aren’t accurate), is this would a similar issue? Is seeing some of what people are saying, but not all, providing a true representation of the network’s feelings? Those that comment in groups or forums tend to fit the same behavioural patterns of those that vote, and as a result most of the content is either very positive – or very negative.

Paul Taylor, co-founder of 6consulting, the social media monitoring company that brings the Radian6 platform to the UK, said that for any site using a voting system, the computer-generated sentiment tracking that the company uses can only work with what’s there (in short, it can’t provide much insight into the true feelings of a community). However, the Facebook discussion boards will be tracked using human-generated sentiment analysis (real people).

He then went on to say that though the company itself doesn’t recommend using computer generated tracking (the industry standard is 60-70% and Paul doesn’t think the technology is, or ever will be good enough). This was refreshing to hear to say the least. As is this, taken directly from the Radian6 blog; “until/unless automated sentiment reaches unquestionable accuracy (not likely anytime soon), the human factor in analysis for sentiment is absolutely critical, and irreplaceable.”

However, Radian6 has just started testing computer-generated sentiment analysis, after increasing customer demand to provide this service. What’s going on in the minds of those asking for this and what they think they’re getting out of a service that isn’t accurate enough, even according ot hose that stand to make money from selling it? Is it a cost issue? Answers on a postcard please.

Radian 6 also announced yesterday that Microsoft has selected the company as one of its social media monitoring tools, which will be used within the Central Marketing Group. Knowing MSFT’s penchant for acquiring companies they see potential in, which often begins with a partnership of this kind, I asked Paul about this but he of course couldn’t comment. Keep your eyes peeled for further updates.