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

In response to 'anonymous' we agree that a combination of human/automated analysis is the best solution for traditional media evaluation, but that's not an area on which we're focusing. Indeed, we believe the demand for real-time analysis of online media will grow phenomenally over the next five years for which automated analysis will be the only practical solution. People are, however, missing two really fundamental points here, which are (a) that automation allows data to be analysed in proper real-time and (b) that this then enables very large volumes of data to be collected on a time series basis without any feedback 'contamination'. In fact this is remarkably straightforward and can be done with virtually no risk of false positives. As a result we can carry out truly amazing, extremely robust statistical analysis that would otherwise be impossible, which is revealing things that human analysis could not. An example, which we'll be reporting on shortly, is to track the impact of senior management spokespeople on their company's share price. Using time series analysis we can measure this against share price at extremely high levels of confidence (99% +), providing very valuable feedback for companies whose CEOs are very busy people and need strong evidence for the time they might be asked to give. Last but not least, something else automated analysis can do that human analysis cannot is to determine the strength of coverage from a search engine optimisation perspective. Everybody thinks keywords are critical for driving page ranking but these are actually very blunt measures and there are far, far more powerful algorithms that only automated text mining can reveal. Indeed, this is something we can do very easily. As a result we can tell companies how well their coverage is supporting their SEO strategy, which as search becomes the number one citerion is rapidly becoming as, if not more powerful than tone. It's relatively early days but I think you'll see automated analysis come into its own over the next few years.

16-Jun-2009

12:13 pm