Open Data Now: The Secret to Hot Startups, Smart Investing, Savvy Marketing, and Fast Innovation

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Marketing Science of Sentiment Analysis

THERE ARE TWO REASONS TO WATCH YOUR ONLINE REPUTATION: one is to improve it, and one is to learn from it. You can buy reviews outright (bad idea) or encourage authentically positive reviews (better) to improve your company’s online rep. But that won’t do anything to change the true level of customer satisfaction or make your company run better. To make smart changes in business strategy and operations, you need to understand what your customers are telling you through their tweets, reviews, and blog posts.

A number of market analysts now use what’s called sentiment analysis to get customer insights from social media. Sentiment analysis deals with the potential biases of Twitter, blogs, ...