Earlier this month, we talked about sentiment analysis. In this post, I’ll dive into the topic of adding meaning to the numbers. Having a nice number of total positive mentions doesn’t have to be representative of how each customer segment feels about your organization, brand, or products/services.
Adding Up The Numbers
As discussed earlier this month, the most important thing to discern in sentiment analysis is the uniqueness of sentiment, i.e. whether the sentiments monitored/measured are unique to a person or is distributed through influence or virality.
Throughout this post, I’ll use the following example. A company has monitored the social web and has filtered out the unique sentiments that mention something about the company. A total of 5,010 sentiments were found. The company found 1,765 positive mentions; 2,357 neutral mentions; and 888 negative mentions.
From a totals perspective, this looks quite promising. When the neutral mentions are disregarded, the company gets nearly twice as many positive mentions as negative mentions. However, it’s time to put the numbers into perspective.
Adding Customer Segments
The company in our example makes a distinction between four customer segments, based on demographics and usage: (1) business, (2) families, (3) young people, and (4) luxury. The monitored mentions have been mapped according to these customer segments and the results are in the table below.
You’ll see that the 1,765 positive mentions are still the eye-catcher of the table, but it gets more interesting when you convert the table into percentages:
In this case, some interesting figures become apparent. Each segment has something that requires the attention of the company:
- In the business segment, it’s the overwhelming amount of neutral mentions. Here, the company can work to improve those neutral mentions to becoming positive mentions.
- In the families segment, things look positive. If the company can convert the 37% of neutral sentiment into positive sentiment, it will establish a very strong position in the segment.
- Things don’t look so positive though in the young people segment. A whopping 54% of the measured, unique mentions are negative. The company clearly has to right the ship in that segment or it might lose a lot of future business.
- The luxury segment is interesting as well. Almost half the mentions are neutral, but there is almost an even division between positive mentions and negative mentions. In this case, the company needs to gain a deeper understanding of why the public opinion is so divided and also of how it can sway some of the “neutrals” to the positive side.
Of course, the sentiment measured on the social web doesn’t have to be representative of a segment’s total population. However, the overall segment is more strongly influenced by the sentiment within the segment than by sentiment outside the segment. For example, a person looking for a business-line product will look at reviews from business users of the company and not necessarily at reviews from those in the families segment.
Are you performing a cross-analysis of customer sentiment and customer segments? Gauge what the sentiment per segment is. Look at where you can improve your position as a brand and take that next step, which is reacting appropriately to the data to help boost your brand’s perception and eventually sales.
As always, if you have comments, experiences or nuggets of wisdom to share, feel free to leave a comment!
Photo credit: Megan Fizell, Tres Jolie Studios
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