Photo Courtesy: Flickr/katerha

Among the topics covered at this week’s Sentiment Analysis’ Symposium was an exploration of just how much the negative or positive expression of sentiment about a company or a product really matters – and in what context it does. (Another one, which The Semantic Web Blog covered yesterday here, looked at the expected transition from sentiment to emotions analytics.)

Augie Ray, director of social media at Prudential Financial, and formerly a social media leader at USAA and Forrester, recounted some of the bigger blow-ups online in recent years: The passenger whose guitar was broken by United Airlines and made a Youtube video that went viral; NBC’s 2012 London Olympics coverage that was criticized for dissing a tribute to the victims of terrorist bombings, among other things; and Bank of America’s being castigated for its announced plan to institute debit card fees.

“We live and die by the concept that negative sentiment matters,” he said.

Read more

MOOCs (massive open online courses) are gaining greater ground. Earlier this year we looked at some semantics-related MOOCs of study from outfits like Coursera, edX and Udacity. Since then, news has gone around about some other MOOC opportunities (albeit not necessarily with semantic course offerings), such as MOOC2Degree, Canvas Network, CourseSites, Udemy and Thinkful. The Hasso Plattner Institute also is involved with its openHPI courses, including coverage of semantic web technologies.

Now, word comes that Iversity, which offers its own MOOC platform, and the Foundation for German Science are sponsoring a competition to produce ten MOOCs, five courses for the winter term 2013/14 and five courses for the summer semester 2014. Winners will get  25,000 Euro grants each towards production. The MOOC Production Fellowship selection process is being managed by Iversity, as is the subsequent course production.

About 250 concepts for online courses have been submitted so far, and Internet users have up until May 23 to cast their votes for the ones they view as particularly interesting and groundbreaking. A list of submissions is here.

The categories range from linguistics and cultural studies to interdisciplinary work to natural and computer sciences. The entries include courses focused on semantic, social analytics and related technologies:

Read more

According to a release out of the company, “Parta Dialogue, a leader in social media optimization, analytics and Social Learning, announces today that it has signed a letter of intent (LOI) to acquire MyTwatch, a private Paris-based e-intelligence and social marketing technology company.” Parta Dialogue CEO Paul Allard commented, “This acquisition is an important step for us in building out the most robust offering in the market for brands and companies to win at digital social media strategy. MyTwatch’s proprietary listening technology and semantic analysis round out our strengths in creating, distributing and measuring social media content. With the capability to execute in 6 languages, their platform will become a key aspect in our effort to attract customers globally.” Read more

For many companies, understanding what’s being said about them or their products and services in the real-time social media space will only become more important. Vendors of social and customer analytics solutions are aiming to fill the need: A couple of weeks ago, heavyweight Salesforce said the Twitter firehose will be funneled to its social analytics arm Radian6. Last week, Attensity announced the Attensity Pipeline, which is its foray into providing a semantically annotated social media data stream in real-time, as a cloud service, tapping into the full Twitter firehose as well as public Facebook and Google Plus posts, blogs, forums, and video and review sites.

“We have had previous generations of this [technology] used in back end products that were more batch-oriented,” says Catherine van Zuylen, vp, product at Attensity. “This is the first time it is real-time and in the cloud at scale.”

Read more

Karen Hanna recently posed the question, can Twitter predict the President? She explained, “Some data analysts are looking at political sentiment in social media data to make predictions around the presidential campaigns. Attensity looked at 800,000 Tweets from February 25 through March 2 and measured ‘positive sentiment and share of voice for each candidate.’ Attensity determined that Romney would win seven states, Gingrich would win Georgia, Paul would win Alaska, and Santorum would take Vermont. Attensity was asked by USA Today to analyze Twitter data to predict how voting would go on Super Tuesday. Attensity is a social analytics company based in Palo Alto. Like other social media analytics companies, it is interested in how text analysis techniques might be applied to data collected from social media to enhance market research capabilities.” Read more

Bill Ives has commented on NetBase’s recent partnership with SAP. Ives writes, “Now here is a good idea. Why not move social media analysis beyond the marketing department to provide its benefits to other groups within the enterprise? This is exactly what NetBase is doing through its reseller relationship and collaboration with SAP.  NetBase reads and analyzes vast amounts of social media data in real time to help organizations understand what people are saying on the Web: what they love (and hate) about brands, categories, issues and trends.” Read more

If it’s been a while since you have looked in on the conference program for SemTech SF, you may have missed the addition of some significant, exciting sessions.  Recent additions to this year’s conference include:

Aditya Kalyanpur, research staff member for IBM Research will lead a session entitled “Building Watson: An Overview of the DeepQA Project for the Jeopardy! Challenge,” a discussion of the the DeepQA technology and describe what it was like to build a Watson, the computer system that won on Jeopardy!.

“The rise of the Interest Graph: How Semantic Technology Will Lead What’s Next for the Social Web.” Dave S Copps, CEO of PureDiscovery Corporation, will discuss the reasons why transactional searches will be replaced by social filtering. The real power and potential of semantic technologies will be unleashed as semantic vendors integrate the richness of the data being generated by the social graph (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) to create networks that share more than just a relationship.

Read more

Come tomorrow, you may be looking for a chance to do some relaxing reading after the Thanksgiving football and food fest and the Black Friday shopping chaos.

To that end, The Semantic Web Blog thought it would offer some guidance on a few analyst reports and surveys that you might enjoy spending some time with – and find useful for your business efforts, especially as they relate to how you can help drive value by better engaging with the exploding world of social media  – for your weekend reading:

•  Gleansight: Social Media Monitoring: A new analyst firm, Gleanster LLC, has produced a new report on what companies are learning about the emerging area of mining social media content as they attempt to better understand the voice of the customer to improve marketing and consumer satisfaction and reduce research and support costs, among other things. That includes, of course, using text mining apps to identify topics and using semantic technologies to classify comments by positive or negative sentiment. The report focuses on the challenges — the technological ones, of course, such as finding the valuable nuggets in the volume of data.

Read more

Photo credit: Flickr/Hamed Parham

If your business hasn’t yet begun exploring how it can better understand and respond to the thoughts and opinions about it that consumers share with the world on social media, it may not be long before it does.

Gartner recently released its list of the top ten strategic technologies for 2011, and among the categories on that list was social analytics. The research firm describes social analytics as including techniques ranging from social filtering to social-network analysis to sentiment analysis and social-media analytics.

Those categories – or at least a fair number of the offerings falling into them – owe a lot of their existence to semantic web technologies and standards, from NLP to RDF. As Gartner sums it up, “social network analysis tools are useful for examining social structure and interdependencies” and “involves collecting data from multiple sources, identifying relationships, and evaluating the impact, quality or effectiveness of a relationship.”

Read more