Blog: People vs Machines
No one would dispute that the internet has had a profound and irreversible impact on consumers. Digital conversations are taking place in such large quantities that it is all too easy to believe that only automated tools can help us analyse the dynamics of this new word-of-mouth phenomenon.
But there’s an unstated assumption behind the technology promise: that it is necessary to analyse all or a very large percentage of these conversations in case we miss something. Given that the overwhelming majority of blogs and social media sites have an audience of two (the author and his mother), it’s hard to imagine there is much real influence being exerted.
Even if we did want to track every single conversation, your assertion that automated analysis can yield accurate and consistent measures of sentiment flies in the face of research we conducted recently among a global sample of developers, practitioners, academics and users of these tools. We found no system capable of delivering reasonable accuracy levels around sentiment – certainly nowhere near the levels needed for making business decisions.
We have found an enduring demand for human-based measurement programmes – humans can discriminate irony and sarcasm, they can interpret rules, not just follow them, and they are flexible in dealing with new topics and issues… certainly not computers’ strong points.