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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.

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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:

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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.” continued…

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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.”

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Karen Hanna recently posed the question

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Bill Ives has commented on

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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.

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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.

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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.”

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