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.

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