Let the consultants rejoice! A new buzzphrase is spreading, which means that there is now a new service that can be marketed, discussed, sold & added to the quarterly CRM budgets.
According to Accenture, "Sentiment Monitoring" is:
...an easy and efficient way for enterprises
to gauge customer sentiment from Internet sources. Sentiment Monitoring
Services allows businesses to tap into the Internet—which consumers already use
to share honest feedback on products and services—and to leverage this
information throughout every level of the organization.
The Technology
Sentiment Monitoring
Services searches preferred sites or newsgroups on the Internet for opinions.
Using advanced language technologies, it interprets the sentiment of the text
towards a specified product or service and then provides the user with an
analysis of the results. Sentiment Monitoring Services combines a search agent
and a perception engine to present users with an instant gauge of market
perception of any feature, product, brand or organization. The natural language
processor of the perception engine achieves an accuracy of approximately 90
percent compared to opinion ratings ranked manually.
Sentiment Monitoring Services is built using various
standard software components to ease integration into existing IT systems. An
easy-to-use interface, with user-defined search topics and parameters, reads
any electronic content in multiple languages. Real-time responses are
summarized and the results are clearly formatted and easily repeatable.
Interesting concept – basically, it’s a service that does for you what your friends used to do when we were all back in middle school, i.e. monitoring what the other kids are saying about you when your back is turned, and then reporting back that Jason in study hall said you were a wuss, and that Rachel from homeroom said you were a total ho. Same basic concept, now marketable on a wider scale because of the way that the web has empowered everyone to gossip anonymously about everyone (and everything) else. Evidently the whole "Dell Hell" slides in the PowerPoints at all the various marketing conferences over the years have had the desired effect, if the desired effect was to instill a gut-level instinctual panic akin to that which was allegedly inflicted on the McMartin schoolkids (and later used to raise money in a famous webhoax) when the teachers killed a bunny in front of them.
Marketers and CEOs now break into swimming pools of sweat at the thought of pissed-off customers online trashing their reputation, and those blog postings, chat room transcripts and Amazon/CNET reviews coming up high in the Google searches, thus making useless all the coin being squandered on paid search advertising.
While I think it is absolutely essential to pay attention to what people are saying about you/your company/your product/your service online, I question how accurate the algorithms are that judge whether or not what the bloggers are posting is positive/negative, and to what extent. There are just way, way too many variables in human discourse to comfortably predict that word order, word choice and sentence structure is good, bad or indifferent. And that’s not even getting to the strange contractions, spellings and "1337speak."
Meanwhile, over at Scout Labs (still in beta), they are rolling out the big guns to hustle this whole concept:
I thought of Michael last week when I read BusinessWeek’s article “Consumer Vigilantesâ€. In
it, we hear from some ultra-disgruntled customers who are bashing
companies everywhere they can—on existing sites (amazon.com), specially
created new sites (comcastmustdie.com) and through more “directâ€
channels, like 76-year old Mona Shaw who smashed keyboards and phones
with a hammer at the Comcast headquarters yelling, “HAVE i GOT your attention NOW?!â€
Cue: Count Floyd shivering and stuttering "Oooohh, that’s scary kids!"
The most useful information to come out of all this is the common-sense admonition to treat your customers well, actually let them talk to someone from customer support rather than wade through the goddam voicemail hells and javascript boxes (see: my recent & ongoing experiences with Netgear over their non-functional NAS system). This is an important subject, but I can’t help feeling that this product/service is perhaps a little premature.