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It’s Good To Be Sentimental

There's growing awareness across public relations and marketing that just knowing where something is being mentioned, or how many people saw it, is not sufficient information to for determining campaign ROI, or performing any sort of solid market research. One needs to examine the substance of what's being said, not just its metadata (where, when, how many times, etc.), to extract real value from research. Which was why I was very interested to see this post (via The Basement), about the first publicly available weblog search/data mining tool to take sentiment into account.

As sentiment analysis is a service Cymfony has offered for some time (at a price), some have wondered if it undercuts some of our business model, and if Cymfony did nothing for the past few years, the answer would be yes. As technology advances the marginal cost of performing complex tasks tends to eventually fall to zero, at which point such services will be offered as free or fairly close to it. The only guards against this for any technology-based business are innovation and superior execution.

In this case, opinmind highlights both the opportunities and challenges everyone faces with this sort of analysis. For instance, just before writing this, I went to the site and typed in "apple" for Apple Computer Corporation. The first positive link I get states  "I LOVE apple pie!!!!", quickly illustrating the disambiguation problem, found where a word has more than one meaning. Next I typed in Chevy, to do see what would be revealed about Chevrolet. Ignoring people's opinion of Chevy Chase, I came across "I personally love the Chevy SSR", which is accurate, but probably not representative of all the positive commentary about Chevrolet, the precision versus recall problem. To elaborate, what happens if a person says, "I love the SSR", or "Chevy's have fast pick-up." In the first case, a system has to know that "SSR" means "Chevrolet SSR" and in the second that "fast pick-up" is a desirable automotive characteristic.

No solution can address these issues perfectly, but Cymfony tries to solve them through extensive research and customization. That effort, the associated ongoing support, as well as the addition of different content streams, publication segmentation, post organization, momentum highlighting, analysis and strategic advice, and a host of other services, are what we really charge for, and where the company adds value. Eventually the above problems will become more easily resolved, and Cymfony will have to find other ways to add value. In the interim, we're not going anywhere, and are glad to see people given the tools to begin to unravel the blogosphere.

Posted by Jeffrey Feldman on December 13, 2005 at 06:10 PM | Email this post Permalink

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