Study of influence networks, which Chaudhry calls the “science of opinion leadership, of innovation adoption,” is one approach to understanding stakeholder communities. More broadly targeted marketing initiatives, which are far more typical, similarly benefit from the application of text technologies to analyze sentiment.
Measuring Marketing Effectiveness
Business spends huge sums shaping brand image and promoting brand awareness. To gauge the effectiveness of particular campaigns, corporate marketers will study transactions, for instance sales made in response to direct mail or using coupons, web-page visits and ad click-through, etc. But study of past transactions is of limited use in understanding potential buyers who are not responding to market messaging, in understanding competitive positioning and in picking up on nascent trends. Surveys and social-media mining, especially for attitudinal indicators, can fill the gap.
Unilever is one among many forward-looking producers of consumer packaged goods (CPG) that has applied text technologies to understand consumer sentiment. According to consultant Tom H.C. Anderson of Anderson Analytics, the analysis process applied in studying the Dove-brand pro.age campaign starts with surveys and web scraping from online consumer forums. Sites such as www.campaignforrealbeauty.com and www.doveproage.com have many thousands of messages with potential value. Anderson’s company codes and characterizes data, looking for sentiment polarity – positive, negative and neutral – seeking to understand emotions and attitudes. They apply a “triangulation” process with a 43-attribute “psychological content analysis” and with human coding of random sampling of records that validates results discovered through automated text analytics performed with SPSS Clementine and Text Analysis for Surveys. 数据挖掘实验室
There are many online consumer forums similar to the Dove sites. See, for example, the independent iCompact.com site. Theses forums as well as e-mail and blogs and other social media can be fruitfully mined not only for attitudinal data that indicates market sentiment, but also to understand influence networks, per Aafia Chaudhry’s work, and the diffusion of opinion.
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