Social Media Monitoring: Charter Communications

I decided to track Charter Communications, because I hate them.  They are my internet and cable provider, and as I have explained in a previous blog post, their customer service has always left me far from satisfied. That being said, I have gone into this monitoring process with every intention of not being bias.

Charter has both a Twitter and a Facebook page.

The number of "followers" and "likes are in line with other cable providers.

I found that while some sites, such as Samepoint.com offer an easy, simple, breakdown of social media mentions, they cannot be trusted to give the whole story.

This screenshot, taken on March 10, is an example of where Samepoint failed.  It counts "could," "would," and "give" as positive words, even though the full sentence is: "If I could give Charter zero stars, I would."  Clearly, there is nothing positive in that sentence.  Recognizing that, I realized that each time I use any program I should be very careful in my analysis.  The quantitative numbers would not be nearly as useful as the qualitative posts that they are taken from.

Given that, I took a look at Charter's Yelp page:

Throughout their Yelp page, I found mostly disgruntled customers, upset with their service.  There were a few reviews that were actually positive.  This was clearly different than what Samepoint was showing.

Using Twazzup, I found both positive and negative tweets, mostly concerning customer service.






Within the past week, Charter announced that if Internet is out for more than 24 hours, they will give customers $20.  Even with such a positive announcement, they still were not talked about much on social media, as you can see from this Social Mention screenshot, taken today.