Techcrunch has an interesting article: How We Hate NBC’s Olympic Coverage: A Statistical Breakdown.
The statistics are coming from a couple of different ‘Sentiment Analysis’ services that track what people are saying about brands online. Twitter Sentiment tracks positive and negative comments on Twitter, updated in real-time (image shown above). Another service, Crimson Hexagon, went further to breakdown into specific categories, discovering only 15% were happily watching NBC’s Winter Olympics coverage (more details are provided in the TechCrunch article) whilst 85% were complaining.
What’s interesting is how easy it has been for these services to gather the data. Crimson Hexagon analysed over 20,000 tweets and 5,700 blog posts and forum comments. Twitter Sentiment is continually updating in real-time, as the tweets are posted. When I grabbed the screenshot above, over 2,500 tweets had been automatically categorised as positive or negative.
The analysis demonstrates just how easy it is to discover what people really think thanks to the Internet. People who take the time to tweet and write blog posts are more likely to be giving raw opinions than a selected audience targeted to respond to a survey. For sure we tend to be more compelled to write when we have something bad to say, so results are almost always going to skew towards the negative. But they are readily available, often for free or little cost, and offer an insight into how products and services could be improved. Sentiment analysis shows how businesses can benefit from getting involved in social media, even if only to listen.
References:
- How We Hate NBC’s Olympic Coverage: A Statistical Breakdown (TechCrunch)
- Twitter Sentiment (enter a keyword and hit ‘search’ to track a brand)
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