Your customers already told you.
We went back and read it.
Twelve months of comments on your own social channels — every post, organic and paid — read in full and counted. How much is spam. How many are resale accounts working your threads. How many are impersonating your support team. And what your actual customers said that nobody ever escalated.
A third of it, typically, isn't a customer at all. Most brands have never counted.
Five of 2,159. Two of them aren't customers. One of them is, and nobody replied.
Source: Respondology, 2026 — 168.8M comments across 7.6M posts and ~3,400 brand accounts.
Everyone else starts reading the day you sign.
Listening platforms sample and score sentiment going forward. Moderation vendors hide the bad ones in real time. Both are forward-looking, both are subscriptions — and neither one ever goes back through what your customers already said. That archive is sitting in your own accounts right now.
How much is spam
The industry figure is 20%. Scarcity and drop-culture brands run well above it. Whatever your number is, you've never seen it — and it's the first line of the report.
Resale & counterfeit sellers
Accounts working your comment threads, under your post, in front of your audience. We count them, quote them, and map the repeat offenders.
Support impersonation
Fake accounts watch for anyone who tags you with a complaint, then DM them posing as you. The BBB has issued a consumer alert on this exact pattern.
Paid-social waste
Paid posts run roughly twice as toxic as organic, and spam in the comments cuts conversion by around 15%. Those threads never surface in your main feed — nobody on your team has ever seen them.
What people actually complain about
Themes ranked by volume and trend, with the verbatims that make the case. The complaints your service desk never saw, because they were never tickets.
What's going unanswered
Brands reply to about 3.5% of comments. We show you which of the other 96.5% mattered — the buying questions, the repeat issues, the people who were ready to spend.
Three things you keep. No platform, no seats, no renewal.
The report
Executive summary, the counted inventory, themes with verbatim quotes, the spam and impersonation findings, and prioritised recommendations. A document, not a login.
The tagged master list
Every comment, tagged and dated, filterable by theme, sentiment and spam type. Yours to keep, reuse, and hand to whoever needs it.
The dashboard
An interactive view of the same corpus for the people who'd rather look than read. No account, no subscription, no expiry.
What we don't do. We don't moderate, hide, reply or post on your behalf, and we don't make legal or regulatory determinations. We count what's there, show you the evidence, and tell you what we'd do about it. Anything that belongs with your legal or compliance team, we flag and hand over — for them to decide.
Published — because everyone else in this category hides it.
Fixed fee, quoted up front. No per-comment metering, no seat licences, no annual platform commitment — and every tier sits inside a single manager's signing authority, so nothing goes to procurement.
Pilot
- Twelve-month comment corpus
- Full counted inventory
- Report and tagged master list
- Recorded walkthrough
Standard
- Everything in Pilot
- All owned channels, organic and paid
- Spam, resale and impersonation inventory
- Interactive dashboard
- Live readout if you want one
Portfolio
- Everything in Standard
- Up to five brands or markets
- Benchmarking across your own portfolio
- Priority scheduling
Working through an agency? We deliver white-label. Your agency keeps the client relationship and the platform access; we do the analysis under their mark. Ask them to get in touch.
Reading a year of comments isn't a hard problem.
It's a large one.
A person gets through a few hundred before the pattern blurs. A full year for an active brand runs to tens of thousands. So we built an instrument for it.
Every comment and reply on every post in the period is collected, normalised, and run against a taxonomy we've refined across spirits, independent hospitality, specialty coffee and high-volume direct-to-consumer retail — four categories with almost nothing in common, except that each one taught us a different way a comment section goes wrong.
Every flagged item is then reviewed by hand. Every figure in the report traces back to a specific comment, on a specific post, on a specific date.
Nothing is sampled. Nothing is extrapolated. Nothing is an estimate you have to take on faith.
The whole year
Every post, organic and paid. Listening tools sample a slice and project from it. We read all of it.
Reviewed by hand
The instrument finds candidates. A person decides what they are. We publish the accuracy range rather than implying certainty.
Every figure traceable
Click any number in the report and land on the comment it came from. No black box, no unfalsifiable score.
2,159 comments. One year. One brand. Each dot is ten of them. The 712 in coral weren't customers. A listening tool would have sampled a few hundred and estimated the rest.
How the engagement runs
You grant read-only access
The same view-only permission you'd give any agency, on your own accounts. We never ask for passwords, we never post, and you can revoke it in a click.
We read the year
About two weeks. You do nothing during this period — no workshops, no stakeholder interviews, no homework.
You get the three deliverables
Report, tagged master list, dashboard — plus a recorded walkthrough, so you can circulate it internally without scheduling anything.
Your data stays yours
Held separately from every other client, used only for your engagement, and deleted on request or at the end of the agreed retention period. Never pooled, never published, never sold.
What this cannot see
- Deleted comments. If it was removed before we collected, it's gone — one reason to run this sooner rather than later.
- Private messages. Public comments only.
- Conversation happening somewhere other than your own channels, unless you commission that separately.
- Intent and truth. We can tell you what somebody said and how often. Not whether it was accurate, or whether they ever bought from you.
Four brands. Four findings nobody was looking for.
Client names withheld by agreement. Categories, audience sizes and outcomes are real, and outcomes are as reported by the client.
Scalpers had taken the product
271 posts, 2,159 comments. A third of the comment section wasn't a customer. Underneath it sat sustained, dated evidence that resellers had put the bottle out of reach of the people who actually wanted it — which opened a serious look at alternative routes to genuine buyers.
They hated the new creative
A high-volume paid and organic corpus. Customers were rejecting a new marketing direction built on AI-generated imagery — and saying so plainly, in the comments, while sales slid. The direction was reversed and the sales pattern recovered.
Lunch service was slipping
Twelve months read for service themes. A consistent, specific pattern of lunch complaints that had never reached management — because none of it ever became a ticket. After the standards were addressed, the operator reported lunch profits up 28%.
The flagship was priced wrong
The smallest engagement we've run. The comments were unambiguous that the lead product sat above what the audience would pay. The price was corrected and retail bag sales roughly doubled, almost overnight.
From 3,000 followers to 200,000
The method doesn't change with size. What changes is how much is buried in there — and how long it's been sitting unread. Not one of these four findings came from a survey, a focus group, or a dashboard. All four were already written down.
Ask for the sample report.
It's a redacted engagement on a real consumer brand — the actual document, not a brochure. Email us and we'll send it. No call required, and nothing gets scheduled on you.
rollie@cornerstoneconsultingky.com
What arrives: a full engagement report from real work, with the client and any identifying detail redacted. Same structure, same depth, same three deliverables you would receive. It is the clearest way to see whether this is worth your money, and it costs you nothing but an email.