Our Social Times » Sentiment Detection

How to Analyse Sentiment and Benefit from the Insight it Provides

Luke Brynley-Jones — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 18:56:48 +0000

With just two weeks until Monitoring Social Media Bootcamp, we thought we’d give you a taster of the event with a series of posts about the workshops we’ll be having. First up is Marshall Sponder’s session called “How to Monitor Sentiment and Benefit from the Insight this Provides”.

Marshall has spent much of the last ten years trying out various social media monitoring solutions and sentiment is one of his favourite topics. In this workshop he aims to explain, in layman’s terms, how best to use the sentiment analysis features of social media monitoring tools, how to make sense of the results they produce and how to create value from this knowledge.

First off, Marshall will analyse the different approaches to sentiment from some of the leading monitoring solutions on the market, including Brandwatch, Scoutlabs, Radian6, Sysomos, Crimson Hexagon and Alterian (SM2). He will also demonstrate the differences in sentiment analysis results that these solutions can produce from essentially the same data. Scary stuff if you’re paying good money for comprehensive results!

One of the other key questions Marshall will be addressing in this session is: when is sentiment analysis useful and when isn’t it? He will explore which aspects of social media are best analysed numerically and identify those where sentiment can offer genuine insight and value, citing examples of how – right now – businesses are benefiting from each approach.

Marshall will also look at the accuracy of sentiment analysis. In other words, are the results produced related to the topics we’re interested in? And to what extent can results be improved by filtering out noise? He will demonstrate how to remove non-relevant search results and how, using your social media monitoring tools, you can construct queries that produce accurate results.

One of the hottest issues in sentiment analysis is always the “human” or “machine” intervention question. The question being, should we employ humans to analyse results and rate the sentiment, or should we develop sophisticated reading technology to rate sentiment for us. Marshall will offer his view on which works best (in various case studies) and suggest which option is best for what situations and how accurate you can expect the data from either option to be.

Finally, Marshall will prophesise what we should expect for sentiment analysis over the coming few years. As one of the world’s most experienced social media monitoring analysts – I would expect his opinion to be around 89% accurate ;)

Social Media Monitoring Goes Niche

Luke Brynley-Jones — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 08:53:46 +0000

One of the most interesting points made at Monitoring Social Media 09 last month was the suggestion from Matthäus Krzykowski (VentureBeat) that monitoring could be made more accurate by narrowing the focus of the tools down to a specific industry. It stands to reason really. If you narrow down the lexicon you start to reduce the opportunities for error. For example, if you’re talking within the telecoms industry, “Orange” is likely to mean the mobile operator, rather than the fruit or the colour. By focusing in this way, Matthäus claimed companies could dramatically improve the accuracy of certain key attributes of social media monitoring tools, such as sentiment detection.

The announcement then that MediMix is launching a social media monitoring tool targeted at the pharmaceutical, medical device and biotech industries looks like proof that this logic holds. ScanBuzz™ is already being used to monitor the top 200 products and 100 corporate brands and, in industries where consumer scare stories can be fatal, a quick, informed response could save these companies millions if not billions. Expect to see more of these niche tools launching in 2010. There it is – my first prediction for the coming year!

Microsoft to Launch Social Media Monitoring Tool

Luke Brynley-Jones — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 08:05:39 +0000

Microsoft is planning to launch a social media monitoring tool – that allows users to aggregate social media feeds from Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Facebook and more into a single interface. Dubbed “Looking Glass” the service will be tested over the coming months for a presumed launch in the Winter.

Early indications are that it includes automated sentiment detection but it’s not known what further analysis tools and features are offered. It’s designed to plug into MS Outlook and Sharepoint products, of course, so that’s likely to limit it’s value to Internet users of other persuasions.

Looking Glass will provide integration features for popular CRM’s and databases, so “in theory”, you’ll be able to track social media comments all the way to your bottom line. This is where lots of the SMM companies are looking today – including Radian6, and Market Sentinel in the UK – as they try to move beyond the criticism of providing interesting facts without nailing ROI.

According to TechCrunch the new Microsoft service will offer real-time functionality – i.e. one that instantly reports on relevant posts and comments, as opposed to running periodic or manually instigated checks to review recent data. TC deems this to be the future of social media monitoring, though in our view it feels like just a logical extension of where we’re at today. Surely integrating social media monitoring into the very fabric of companies – the workflows and strategies – is a more radical and interesting prediction of the future of SMM.

We’ll be discussing this and other issues at Monitoring Social Media 09 (MSM09)