Nathan Gilliat discussed sentiment analysis in his blog a while a ago and it provides a great summary of the most common reactions to it. As sentiment analysis is also a part of Whitevector’s services, we’d like to give our view on the topic.
The first two questions asked by companies about to embark upon social media analyses are often “What do people say about us online? Is it positive or negative?”. Even though it’s natural to be interested in the tone of the discussion, this sort of analysis, known as sentiment analysis, shouldn’t be the first priority, or the work risks getting off on the wrong foot.
In our experience it is far better to start any project by studying the general nature of the discussions to see what their overall tone is and in what way people praise or criticize the product in question. This overview is an important phase in analysing discussion sentiments since consumers tend to talk very differently about different products: brands in some categories get very detailed and passionate praise or criticism whereas others are mentioned in varying contexts with less detailed feedback.
After assessing discussions on a general level, it is often useful to include sentiment analysis in any online discussion study. A good way of going about this is to compare the sentiment levels of the studied brands on a monthly basis. One can also compare shares of negative and positive discussions to see if there are any changes in the usual ratio between them. A more detailed drill-down analysis then enables the marketer to understand what has caused the change in the ratio between positive and negative.
Many times companies concentrate in their analyses on the negative comments; Why are people complaining about the product or service? However – are all negative comments bad? Is it not the case that all publicity is good publicity? Of course it is impossible to generalise as sometimes a large number of negative comments might affect sales, whereas any occasional negative remark might serve to raise the public’s top-of-mind awareness of the product, and lead to online correspondents posting multiple positive comments.
Thus, in our opinion, the objective in social media marketing shouldn’t necessarily be about decreasing the absolute number of negative comments, but rather in increasing the number of fruitful and meaningful discussions.
Sentiment Comparison of different airlines in December ‘09, UK based content
We just released a newsletter about sentiment analysis and it can be found here. The article presents also an example analysis of British Airways and other competing airlines.
