LexaBlog: Our Sentiment about Text Analytics and Social Media

I'm very excited. Yesterday, the New York Times published a piece: Mining the Web for Feelings, Not Fact. Alex Wright did a nice job highlighting the uses and benefits of sentiment analysis, particularly how it fits into the search world through sites like Newssift.com, which uses Endeca and Lexalytics as part of its platform, and ScoutLabs for reputation management.

The article also highlighted some of the limitations, which prompted Andy Beal at The Marketing Pilgrim to question the accuracy with, "Why sentiment analysis is about as reliable as a canary in a coal mine", which generated additional comments around automated sentiment analysis software.

Whether your position is that sentiment analysis can or can't help your brand positioning, customer service or reputation management efforts, it was still great to see so many people talking about the capabilities and uses in various industries.  There were several discussions and lively debate born out of the article.

One fallout that I did notice, particularly online, was the assumption that online sentiment analysis companies are growing in number, and that it is an increasingly crowded market.

At Lexalytics, we don't necessarily see it the same way. We are absolutely seeing an increase in solutions and platforms interested in integrating our sentiment analysis, but there are still only a handful of providers (us being one of them, obviously) who can offer the technology. Many of the solutions profiled on the market do a fantastic job at gathering and presenting the results, which is critical when you think about how much information floating around online is written by YOUR customers. But that doesn't necessarily mean that there are more sentiment analysis providers out there - the core analysis engines traditionally sit behind the scenes and do their thing and there are still only a few of us on the market.

After 6 years of honing and refining the software used to provide entity-level sentiment, we're excited that the markets are trying to find new and innovative ways to use sentiment analysis, including solutions in the reputation management, social media, financial services, enterprise search and customer satisfaction industries.