by Angela Guess
Daniel Newman recently wrote in Forbes, “In the days before big data opened doors to seemingly exponential analytical insight, sales and marketing teams often played a guessing game. Were campaigns working? Who were they reaching? What did people think about them? Audience targeting was one way to cut through the noise, but even that was a bit of a crapshoot. Today, though, big data… has created a functional shift from estimated actions to data driven, predictive choices. The growth of sentiment analysis as a marketing tool—that is, technology that determines the emotional tone of statements made online about brands—goes one step further. The possibilities here are huge for your brand as big data and sentiment analysis team up to form a marketer’s dream team.”
Newman goes on, “Sentiment analysis, also known as opinion mining, uses new technologies and algorithms to collect and analyze opinions about a product, service, or even an entire brand. It’s not just opinions, though—it’s also all the attitudes and emotions expressed with each mention online. In short, sentiment analysis seeks to highlight what people mean, not just what they say. Sentiment analysis is not perfect yet though, as it can’t nail the complexities of the human language every single time. The areas of recognizing context and tone, for example, still need some work. Because of that, it’s a pretty one-dimensional technology for now until it can measure things like skepticism, sarcasm, hope, etc. (Sounds like a job for machine learning, if you ask me.)”
Photo credit: Flickr/ Sopha Portal