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Tracking online word-of-mouth: The people vs machines debate

Great debate and I can see see the case for both approaches or a combination depending on the circumstances. Size is a key issue – if you are looking for topline indications across multiple products/brands/services, then automated is probably the way to go. If you're looking for greater depth of analysis – pos/neg/neutral or 1-10 scale assigned to at opinion level (on reference can contain opinions about many concepts, pos, neg or neutral) then human analysis or human moderated automatic analysis is the best bet. I agree with Mike's point that you don't need to look at everything.You also need to provide analysis of the impact of certain media – some of that automated (traffic rankings, link analysis) but some human (frequency of update, originality of content, how interactive is the media). Another issue/question – how is automated analysis developing to cope with langauges others than English?

15-Jun-2009

9:12 am