Analyzing Sentiment

Engagement goes beyond what customers are saying in a literal sense to what they actually feel. To this end, the third component of customer engagement, intimacy, attempts to analyze what exactly customers mean in the content they post. It doesn’t measure how many comments are made or reiterate the comments themselves, but rather analyzes the sentiment behind the comments.

This brings us to a relatively new metric, dubbed sentiment analysis. This involves parsing and analyzing the comments that customers and others post online, typically via social media. It’s not just reading the comments verbatim; the emphasis is on the context, tone, emotion, and objectivity of the comments.

Although sentiment analysis is still in its infancy, the thinking behind the technique is sound. You want to measure not just what people are saying, but how and why they’re saying it.