o Why should I care about tracking sentiments?
Because people’s opinions matter. Whether you are tracking mainstream press, consumer-generated media such as blogs and product reviews, or your proprietary data, such as customer emails, you can get insight into what people think, understand how their thinking is changing over time, and plan accordingly. That has always been the case; but the ability to track sentiments programmatically has developed only recently, as technology caught up with explosive growth of the opinion information available online.
o How do you know that your sentiment measurement is accurate?
We have carefully verified the accuracy of our measurements, using a series of control experiments, where the same documents have been graded by our system, and by human subjects. Different people may assign somewhat different grades to the same documents. We have established, however, that the variance between sentiment grades assigned by our system, and the average grade assigned by people, differs only so slightly from the variance between people.
o If we are interested in sentiments, isn’t it enough to track blogs?
We don’t think so. Yes, tracking blogs can provide useful information, and even offer the insight into how the sentiments of the target population can be influenced, but we do not believe blogs tell the full story. According to the Pew Internet study, 8% of the US population writes blogs, and about 30% of the population reads blogs. Bloggers may not accurately represent the opinions of the general population, or of the specific population that is of interest to you. And more people read mainstream media, than blogs. We believe that there should be a choice of sources, especially if non-US sources are of interest, and the ability for the users to mine their own proprietary data.
o How does sentiment analysis compare to traditional market research?
Market researchers have developed powerful methods for both qualitative, and quantitative research, which can answer a wide variety of questions. One of the primary weaknesses of these methods is that they are both time and resource intensive: quality requires time, careful prep work, and skillful execution. Sentiment analysis methods complement traditional market research, by providing actionable insights in real time, very inexpensively.
o Can’t I get the same insights using a search engine?
We don’t think so. Search engines are much better at ranking documents than at selecting really useful data. So you will have to scan a lot of content from a lot of sources to accumulate the data that you will need to gauge the prevailing sentiment about the topic of interest. In many cases, search results will produce a lot of duplicative information and blog spam, so some of this time will be spent filtering unnecessary information.
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