Feelings Measured on the Internet?

With "70-80 percent accuracy," you can now measure online sentiment regarding your brand. That's right, the latest wave in culling the Internet for market research uses algorithms to do a "sentiment analysis" on a topic and grade the emotional reaction on subjects related to your brand.

"Mining the Web for Feelings, Not Facts" in the August 24, 2009 issue of The New York Times details the emerging field of Sentiment Analysis and looks at three companies: Scout Labs, Jodange and Newssift - all offering some context for analyzing and, daresay, managing online sentiment.

Sentiment Analysis is especially interesting, because it targets the ever-increasing desire and concern of business owners and managers to contain negative online messaging. It is essential for company's to participate in social media via blogging, Facebook, Twitter and/or LinkedIn. But, the biggest impediment to diving into the Internet marketing universe frequently is a fear of losing control of a brand's image and its message.

Sentiment Analysis applications take Google Alerts to the next level. These new applications agree that comments on the Web rarely die into utter obscurity, but they can be tracked and mobilized into positive business-to-consumer engagement.

The days of the Internet being the land of anonymity to vilify businesses or people are quickly being wrangled. There is, as yet, no perfect science to controlling negative online messages, but if your company continues to add to the authentic and transparent messaging through news posts and other social media avenues, then your brand is certain to weather the critics well.

While the concept of adequately measuring emotions - especially written feelings - seems a tad far-fetched, these sentiment analyzer applications do work to better harness negative online commentary. Most marketing gurus would tell you that, in most cases, dissatisfied customers could be converted to satisfied customers if the situation is properly managed. Well, consider the World Wide Web on its way to being properly managed.