ASOS, the ultra popular online fashion retailer, has taken a brave transparent step with it’s latest dedicated campaign site and pushed their real-time sentiment analysis straight to the consumer via it’s new site asosreviews.com
Sentiment analysis, just one of the ultra hot topics currently rocking the Social Media Monitoring (SMM) world is when you use tools, sometimes manually but often these days automatically, to judge/guess what the people out there who are talking about you/your brand/your product are saying and basically if they are saying nice things or horrible things.
it’s not an exact science at the moment, and it can be done wrong in the raw terms of GOOD vs BAD (especially when you consider things like the word “bad” sometimes meaning “good” – well, in a king of Michael Jackson way… I am sure you know what I mean! Hey, I’m down with the kids!) but overall it is good at giving you an idea of if you’re in the good books or not. backed with human elements then, and manually going over the conversations happening in various social media spaces, you can get a pretty good understanding of things.
so, what ASOS are doing is sticking that raw (presumably) sentiment analysis straight online for all to see.
Their policy is one of transparency – and this is about as transparent as you can get with your audience. if you do something bad, they’ll tell you I am sure, and that in turn will tell other customers etc. so as a brand, in this way, you had best be good right!
it’s very brave of the brand and I have to say I do salute it as a campaign move. I think it’s safe to say that they have the right kind of audience and are the right kind of brand to do this kind of thing – there are certain brands which this obviously wouldn’t work for or just plain wouldn’t have the b*lls to go for it in the first place – so it’s a good bit of judgement on their part and the part of the agency who put it together for them, thruSites.
At the moment apparently the world is happy with asos – which is nice to know 
I like this – great piece of comms and good for some quick, easy win, hot topic awareness raising.
Should get the tongues wagging!
Howard
