Sentiment analysis by itself doesn’t suffice

An interesting article by Seth Grimes caught our eye this week. Seth is one of the few voices of reason in the world of text analytics that I feel “gets it”. His views on sentiment’s strengths and weaknesses, advantages and shortcomings align quite perfectly with Repustate’s general philosophy.

In the article, Seth states that simply getting relying on a number denoting sentiment or a label like “positive” or “negative” is too coarse a measurement and doesn’t carry any meaning with it. By doing so, you risk overlooking deeper insights that are hidden beneath the high level sentiment score. Couldn’t agree more with this and that’s why Repustate supports categorizations.

Sentiment by itself is meaningless; sentiment analysis scoped to a particular business need or product feature etc. is where true value lies. Categorizing your social data by features of your service (e.g. price, selection, quality) first and THEN applying sentiment analysis is the way to go. In the article, Seth proceeds to list a few “emotional” ones (promoter/detractor, angry, happy etc). that quite frankly I would ignore. These categories are too touchy-feely, hard to really disambiguate at a machine learning level and don’t tie closely to actual business processes/features. For instance, if someone is a detractor, what is that is causing them to be a detractor? Was it the service they received? If so, then sentiment analysis for customer service is the category you want and negative polarity of the text in question gives you invaluable insights. The fact that someone is being negative about your business means almost by definition they are detractors.

Repustate provides our customers with the ability to create their own categories according to the definitions that they create. Each customer is different, each business is different, hence the need for customized categories. Once you have your categories, sentiment analysis becomes much more insightful and valuable to your business.

Learn more about the latest advancements in social media sentiment analysis.