How Software Automatically Ranks and Manages Online Customer Feedback
A system that automatically finds, scores, and prioritizes online mentions of a company so they can respond to the most important conversations first.
Patent Number
US 8983975
Status
Active
Filing Date
February 23, 2009
Grant Date
March 17, 2015
Expiration
~February 2029 (estimated)
Claims
19
Assignee
Individual
Inventors
Terry Dean Blankers, Aria Haghighi, Christopher Kenton
Citations
27 forward · 45 backward
What it covers
This system acts as a digital filter for a company's online reputation. It uses automated search queries to scan the internet for mentions of a specific entity, such as a brand or person. Once it finds a relevant post, it saves it as a 'discrete incident' and assigns it a score based on metrics like keyword density or emotional sentiment. Finally, it ranks these incidents based on the importance of the source and the content's score, presenting a prioritized list to the company so they know which customer complaints or mentions need immediate attention.
What it doesn't cover
- —Does not cover manual social media monitoring where a human manually searches for posts.
- —Does not cover systems that simply aggregate data without performing automated scoring and prioritization.
- —Does not cover general search engine technology that does not link content to a specific entity for incident management.
The clever bit
The system doesn't just find mentions; it prioritizes them by combining the relevance of the content with the authority of the source, effectively automating the triage process for brand management.
Why it matters
Before tools like this, companies were overwhelmed by the sheer volume of social media noise. This patent describes the infrastructure for modern social listening platforms, allowing businesses to turn chaotic internet chatter into a structured 'to-do' list for customer support and public relations teams.
Real-world examples
- 1.Brandwatch
- 2.Sprout Social
- 3.Hootsuite
- 4.Salesforce Marketing Cloud
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