How Do You Feel about Sentiment Analysis?

By Jake • January 26th, 2011 • 4 Comments

Glancing at my predictions for 2011, I wish I could get a mulligan on the reputation one, which is a like a wish that I keep hoping will come true.

It won’t, at least not in 2011.

If I had a do-over, I’d predict something awesome for sentiment analysis. After all, we’ve been talking about Twitter, Facebook and sentiment, e.g. twistori, for a while.

Two stories this week point to a big year:

Fflick rates movies based on tweets about the movie. Twitter has become a key piece of movie marketing, as studios recognize and try to harness its ability to predict box office performance. No surprises here really. Going to see a movie is a core “what are you doing?” activity, as is discussing the movie with friends.

Everyone understands the power of social recommendations, and movies are an area where they carry a lot of weight. Google, said to be focusing more on social, is smart to buy up this algorithm, which can be easily rolled into its overall search capabilities. Google already uses the frequency of search keywords, e.g. the Google Flu Trends, to plot and model behavior.

Predicting the stock market is a bit more involved, but the relationship between mood (as interpreted by certain words appearing in tweets) and the DJIA produced a startling correlation. Researchers found that words indicating calm preceded rises in the market by three or four days.

There’s a lot of science in there, but that’s pretty amazing.

Anyway, as more people tweet and post status updates, the more data exist to map emotions to real world events. This is really cool stuff.

Thoughts?


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  • uvox

    I think sentiment analysis is critical in the enterprise space if companies want to understand and manage their brand, loyalty, user experience and leverage ideas and intelligence in the crowd. The idea of ignoring what’s going on in social media and trying to protect a company image and reputation through an official web presence has had its day: http://simonmainwaring.com/brands/the-death-of-corporate-websites-top-10-ways-they-will-change/

    Definitely there is a big interest to harness SA capability, and I think 2011 will the year for it to become of age really.

    I’ve tried playing around with a few free tools, see the answers to my Quora question if you are interested: http://www.quora.com/Is-there-a-free-online-sentiment-analysis-service-for-Twitter-accounts

    Of course, we all do our own sentiment analysis all the time with social media don’t we? Every time I see a bunch of LinkedIn resume updates from the same organization, I go, “uh-oh, stock going down, layoffs imminent, etc”…. “)

  • http://theappslab.com Jake

    Yeah, there’s definitely value in easy stuff for companies with brands. I find that boring though, and it’s easily gamed. Feels like an incremental improvement on FB ads.

    Complex algorithms and comparisons with other metrics bring out the really cool observations.

    Oh, and I don’t see any value in Quora. Maybe you can enlighten us all :)

  • http://sethgrimes.com Seth Grimes

    Jake, if you’d like to take a deep dive, check out a conference I’m organizing, the Sentiment Analysis Symposium, April 12 in New York: http://sentimentsymposium.com .

    Seth

  • http://theappslab.com Jake

    Thanks for the tip.