Social sentiment matters!

Social sentiment matters — customer opinions, attitudes, and emotions — rants and raves that affect corporate reputation, provide valuable market and brand insights, and help you understand and engage with customers.

Yet there are too many low-grade tools out there. Sentiment analysis done right is about much, much more than simply scoring tweets and reviews. Sentiment analysis done right discovers business value in customer, consumer, and constituent content and behaviors, whether online, on-social, or in enterprise feedback

The Sentiment Analysis Symposium, May 8 in New York, is the place to learn more. This is an authoritative conference that brings together experts and practitioners from research and industry. You’ll have an unmatched opportunity to learn about state-of-the-art technologies, how they are applied, return on investment, and how to choose from among the many available options.

Options help you understand social conversations and also direct and indirect feedback (such as surveys, contact-center notes, and warranty and insurance claims), online news, presentations, even scientific papers: Any information source that captures subjective information.

Advanced analyses monitor and measure sentiment and often much more, linking sentiment to demographics, customer profiles, behaviors, and transactional records. They help business analysts (and marketers, market researchers, customer service and support staff, product managers, and other users) get at root causes.  These are the explanations of behaviors captured in transaction and tracking records. Sentiment analysis means better targeted marketing, faster detection of opportunities and threats, brand-reputation protection, and the ultimate aim, profit.

Social Media revolve around feelings, attitudes, and emotions. Facebook and Twitter are major sources of sentiment (and also of complementary social connectedness data). Facebook and Twitter accounts have profile data attached to them, but nothing that matches the detailed, usably-structured information you can find on LinkedIn. Google is the ultimate information-access engine, capable of bringing together information from a huge variety of disparate sources, including sentiment information such as product, restaurant, and hotel ratings, although when corporations wish to find, mine, and exploit sentiment they need to turn to deeper BI and analytics tools.

There’s no one-size-fits-all sentiment solution, not Google or one of the several as-a-service solutions out there or any of the capable analysis workbenches or social-media analytics tools. Instead, there’s a whole spectrum of sentiment sources and analysis possibilities.

These are a sampling of the topics that will be covered at the May 8 Sentiment Analysis Symposium. You will meet and learn from experts, strategists, practitioners, researchers, and solution providers – experienced and new users and those evaluating solutions. A sample of speakers for the event includes the American Red Cross, Fidelity Investments, Thomson Reuters, American Express, Kraft Foods, and the Wall Street Journal.

For a crash course on technology concepts, you should also attend the May 7, half-day Practical Sentiment Analysis tutorial, taught by Prof. Bing Liu. (Check out this profile of Bing that appeared in the January 27, 2012 New York Times.)

To register please visit sentimentsymposium.com/registration.html today. See you there!