‘What is gamer gate?’ was the sixth most asked ‘what is’ question on Google in the US during 2014. A continuing controversy that exploded on Twitter surrounding misogyny, harassment and ethics in video game culture, ‘gamer gate’ was still generating a massive 316,669 tweets in a 72-hour period, two months after it first erupted.

More recently, it has becoming famous for demonstrating the continued difficulty in accurately measuring sentiment.

Newsweek enlisted a sentiment analysis agency to unravel the social conversation surrounding gamer gate and reported that 90 per cent was neither positive or negative (a red flag given the heat of the discussion) whilst in response, other analysis conducted showed that 90-95 per cent did in fact take a clear side. A vast discrepancy between sources who must surely have methods of analysis they trust?

Happily, I believe 2015 will prove a watershed year in being able to rely on sentiment analysis.

In 2014 Hootsuite purchased and integrated analytics start-up uberVu, as well as purchasing social voice technology start-up Zeetl, raising $60m in financing and following on from $165m a year ago.

Meanwhile, the Stanford professor who claimed to have solved true sentiment analysis in 2013 was recently unveiled as part of a new deep learning start-up, MetaMind, that just raised $8m including funding from VC leaders, Khosla Ventures. In addition, Twitter revamped its advanced search to facilitate searching all historical tweets, and Facebook rolled out its graph search functionality onto its mobile app.

All of these point to a far better understanding of brand perception.

This is an exciting time in social media, where the work of key players like Hootsuite could soon take us beyond a binary thumbs up/thumbs down view of public opinion, gaining a real qualitative measure of social success.

Social media will move from being simple quantitative data and shallow demographics indicators, to become a pivotal KPI mapped against all our activity – online and offline – with real-time response, global reach and a true understanding of our audience as humans, not numbers.