Sentiment Analysis

Thu, Sep 3, 2009 Posted By:Eric Friedman

Interactive Advertising, Marketing, Marketing 2.0, Social Media

Understanding when your company or brand is being talked about is important. Understanding whether or not your company or brand is being talked about positively or negatively may be more important.

In the last few years the research behind sentiment analysis has ranged from thumbs up\thumbs down and emoticon faces to more advanced methods.

A few companies mentioned in the article above are trying to sort out the signal from the noise like Tweetfeel, twendz, and twitrratr and others like Trendrr (can I buy a vowel please alex). Each has their own way of parsing data, mainly Twitter data, to mine the conversations for sentiment.

In the larger universe of analytical tools you have companies like BuzzLogic, TechRigy, Radian6, Visible Technologies, Viral Heat, and a bunch of new startups all trying to solve this marketers puzzle.

At the low end these services cost $10.00-$20.00 per month and on the high end thousands. Depending on what you are tracking, how far back you want to go, and how hands on of a solution you need, someone is building a sentiment analysis tracker for your.

The goal here is to track beyond mentions. For example, if your brand is mentioned 2,654 times – how do you know what the sentiment of most\some\all of those messages are? Where are conversations happening about your brand in the first place? How can you respond back to solve problems, answer questions, and apologize where necessary?

In thinking about the sentiment analysis market, I am trying to frame thinking 5 years out when brands will themselves have more conduits to their customers. Will systems still exist that brands do not know about and are not tracking? Or will the convergence of connectivity mean a more aware corporate culture that does not need to use yet another tool in their arsenal. Perhaps 5 years is too short of a timeline, but certainly they will have a grasp on this in 10-20 years.

I am curious to know what tools I should be looking at and how people are solving brand tracking probelms today. Let me know if you have ideas in the comments below.

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This post was written by:

Eric Friedman - who has written 646 posts on Eric Friedman – Marketing.fm.

Analyst at Union Square Ventures, blogger at www.marketing.fm and operating experience within SEM, SEO, and Social Media. You should follow me on twitter @EricFriedman

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  • Eric:

    Sentiment analysis is but one of many ways to characterize unstructured text data pulled from the web. We can also count mentions, calculate word associations, measure issues and drivers of sentiment, measure emotions and motivations, etc.

    The key question is so what? We use all of these techniques to understand why people do what they do.

    Brand tracking is about 10% of the value of social media monitoring and analysis. Most online conversation is not for or about brands, but what people care about. As a brand you need to figure out what people are passionate about and connect yourself to that in a compelling and authentic way.

    Two personal rants about this here:

    http://tinyurl.com/cgzts4 (Baking a Social Media Cake)

    and here:

    http://tinyurl.com/cyv4ns (Communities don't care about brands)

    Finally, there is a lack of clarity about the use of social media monitoring & analysis. One clear beneficial use is very reactive and PR related - like @comcastcares.

    Another is as a marketing research tool. Why is the world the way it is, and what threats and opportunities does that present for my brand/company? That's what we do - and sentiment is one of many inputs.

    Tom O'Brien
    MotiveQuest LLC
  • From my experience, none of these tools actually solve the exact problem you are describing. I do think it's solvable, but on a smaller scale. In my opinion, the analytics industry is at a high-level point, where everyone is trying to do everything for everyone. The winners will be the ones that choose a specific industry / niche / technology, an do it better than everyone else.
  • I agree - I have yet to see one dominant niche specific analytics platform
    concentrating on one area. I think this is customer driven though and
    companies are wanting to enter the market with an "everything" approach vs.
    a laser focused entry.
  • I've seen some niche companies in sports, entertainment, and travel. Several vendors have offered vertical market services without making it the focus of their companies.

    BTW, BuzzLogic has taken their monitoring tool off the market as a separate offering. It's all about their ad network now.
  • I've actually seen two niche analytic services pop up recently, and they
    both happen to be music industry tools:

    The Next Big Sound <http://www.nextbigsound.com/>

    Band Metrics <http://bandmetrics.com/>

    Interesting, for sure, to see how these platforms will expand.
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