There is a growing amount of discussion happening about understanding the return-on-investment of social media.

eg. What is the value of spending $100k to encourage chatter? Will it generate sales? Just because people are talking about you, how can you tell if that conversation is actually doing more damage than good?

I’ve been reading a number of articles recently, but this one in particular pointed towards research and mathematics so I followed one link to another to compile this list of reads:

• Twitter Effect Redux: 78% of Tweets About Inglourious Basterds Were Positive.
• Information about Crimson Hexagon’s VoxTrot Opinion Monitor which was used for the tweet monitoring.
• And for any budding maths enthusiasts, the abstract for “A Method of Automated Nonparametric Content Analysis for Social Science” links to a PDF from Harvard Professor, Gary King, outlining the research and mathematical formulas used by the VoxTrot Opinion Monitor.