Conversation is context

AdWeek has revealed that, despite Walmart’s fervent social media activity, it actually looses out to Target in terms of the relevance and sentiment of the conversation generated around its brand. By using ‘sentiment analysis’, the nature – not just the volume – of the competitors’ WOM has become clear.

This principle has been key to 1000heads’ work since our foundation nine years ago.  It may seem obvious that conversation is meaningless without context, but the glut of free WOM scraping tools available could suggest otherwise. Our proprietary software is designed to identify key words indicating sentiments and emotions – but we also use living, breathing, thinking and feeling researchers to examine what’s really going on. When analysing conversation polarity, we don’t just consider whether it’s positive, negative or neutral – we judge the strength of that sentiment on a scale of -10 to 10.  We also map the ‘emotional index’ of a brand’s WOM: does it indicate plenty of anticipation, but not much satisfaction? Are the high levels of concern or anxiety offset by buckets of passion?

We’ve said it before: data is data. Meaningful WOM analysis looks at types of emotion, depth of feeling, intentions, motivations and much more. We’re interested in the people using the technology – your customers – and how they feel, not the figures on a dashboard.

Brought into the world on Tuesday, September 8th, 2009 and filed under Uncategorized.