Marketers are turning to tools and firms that turn online consumer chatter into actionable data. Last month, NY Times covered the growing field of sentiment analysis, where all manner of online chatter is tracked and turned into hard data for marketers to decipher. In addition to user operated tools, such as Twitter mining apps and Financial Times news topic tracking tool Newssift, research firms are popping up to help marketers track the huge volume of blogs and other online consumer opinions.
Following up the Times piece, Kevin Randall at Fast Company says the field is potential evolution for market research. Randall touches on what most marketers can relate to, the difficulty in garnering objective data with common consumer research methods. Crystallizing what many have thought, he questions how much value to put into data culled from participants gathered by the promise of pocket cash and free food. While he does see the field as still developing, including the language processing algorithms behind automated analysis tools, he argues sentimental analysis could transform market research.
Read Randall’s piece at Fast Company.
Fast Company’s link to the Times article is broken. You can access it at NY Times.
