I heard an informative presentation from sentiment analytics platform Crimson Hexagon at Internet World 2013 yesterday, after sitting through the First Tuesday startup awards (event planner for the on-the-go crowd YPlan won) first. I asked at the end for an example of where the sentiment tool’s analysis of not just what but why customers expressed certain feelings about a product. And here is that example, of how Microsoft used it to guide the real-time Bing marketing strategy is embedded below (the Google Docs Viewer version is a tad truncated, so go here for the download link).
In light of that it will be interesting how a rival upstart, such as the new TheySay sentiment platform from the University of Oxford, which claims to have better language analysis functionality, actually does in terms of guiding marketeers:
“TheySay delivers a revolutionary approach to automated sentiment analysis based on advanced computational linguistics. Impartial benchmarking studies have been carried out by leading organisations that verify TheySay’s superior performance compared to other available sentiment analysis tools.” But for me, having studied sentiment analysis tools on behalf of Sony, the question is can it deliver improved business performance to compete with Crimson Hexagon? It’s great they give away the api to TheySay, check it out here, but I’m guessing the ‘chicken and egg’ of winning clients and creating compelling case studies to drive sales is the next significant step. Whoever gets that job I’m sure will need to know how to create social ROI from the inside out.