UPDATED 14:37 EDT / OCTOBER 19 2011

NEWS

Consumer Revolution: The Power is Now in Our Hands

Brian Solis, the principal of a research-based advisory firm and globally recognized as one of the most prominent thought leaders and published authors in new media.  He joined the Altimeter Group back in March of 2010 together with industry heavyweights Charline Li and Jeremiah Owyang.  His book, Engage!, is regarded as the industry’s reference guide for businesses to build and measure success in the social web.

Solis is a digital analyst, sociologist, and futurist, who studied and influenced the effects of emerging media on business, marketing, publishing, and culture.  And now, with the emergence of consumer revolution, he published another book, The End of Business as Usual, which explores each layer of this complex consumer revolution that is changing the future of business, media, and culture. The book reveals how digital culture is changing the landscape of business, consumerism, the workplace, and what to do about it.

“This book is about the new age of business, consumerism and the individual’s role in defining the future of everything. Simply by discussing the experiences we’ve had with brands and business on review sites, in blogs, and in online communities, we’ve created a new world of consumer influence,” says Solis. “The consumer revolution is already underway, and the question is: How do you better understand the role you play in this production as a connected or social consumer as well as business professional?”

Solis’ new book, The End Of Business as Usual, tackles critical points such as: How shared experiences are redefining brands in digital consumer landscape and astute brands can now also create and steer these experiences; How consumer influence is growing, and businesses can use this to their advantage; Ways to connect with a rising audience (and with audiences of audiences) through new touch points between consumers, brands, and new influencers; Techniques for creating a culture of change to earn trust, influence, and significance among connected customers.

The aim of the book is to change how people see the world of business from sales and marketing to customer service and product development to leadership and culture.  In order to survive the ever changing world of business, one must be able to adapt to these changes in order to evolve and thrive.

Solis isn’t the only who sees the importance of consumers and the role they play in any business.  Viralheat, a social measurement platform that lets users easily comprehend social media, just released a new free, Chrome plug-in, the Viralheat Sentiment Analysis.  What it does is, it gives users real-time sentiment analysis on any social network like Facebook ad Twitter.

Sentiment analysis or opinion mining refers to the application of natural language processing, computational linguistics, and text analytics to identify and extract subjective information in source materials.  Simply put, sentiment analysis is either the positive, negative or neutral reaction of people to certain topics.

The importance of sentiment analysis is that consumers now won’t have to rely on sellers’ words as to whether a product is really good, with the use of the Chrome plug-in, they can just input a product and see what others are saying about the product.  The plug-in gives positive, negative and neutral percentage of people who had something to say about that certain product.

The plug-in is like conducting a poll but instead of creating a poll and letting people vote on it, the plug-in utilizes existing data so everything you need, the data that comes out is based on real-time analysis.  Also, consumers aren’t the only ones who can benefit from this as business owners, who are also consumers themselves, can use this tool to know whether or not their product is getting great reviews as well as get insight as to how their products can be improved.

How Sentiment Analysis Works

Basically, it grades tweets, streams, fan pages, Timeline, News Feed, Comments, profiles and keywords found on Facebook and Twitter to give you a real-time analysis on specific topics you search on.  After installing the plug-in, users just need to set a threshold and it basically performs on its own.

It has a live running counter at the top which gives users real-time running score.  The API has a probability score associated with each tweet or message that is passed, so if a user wants to classify all the tweets with a score of 80% or higher as positive or negative, they can do that and the rest will be classified as neutral.  If, by any chance, you found a tweet or a comment that wasn’t classified correctly, users can send a feedback to Viralheat so they can analyze what went wrong and how they can improve their tool.  And if you are satisfied with the result, you can easily share the stats found at the top.  The best thing about this, since it’s a plug-in, users won’t have to toggle between windows or tabs or even leave the page because the plug-in is on the browser’s toolbar.

It’s Free, Need I Say More?

There are other statistical tools used to measure social sentiments but they are quite expensive.  So why look for something that you have to pay for when there’s something free that works just the same?  Also, it’s trained on a huge customer base so sentiments are based on real people and not algorithms which continues to passively improve the API in real-time.  So the more users use it, the machine will only get smarter thus giving more accurate sentiments.  This is perfect for brands that know their audience and need a custom solution to get an accurate report of their work. And it produces statistics at an unbelievable fast rate so no time is wasted.

Below are some samples of sentiment analysis:

  • TV show reviews (ex: The Office) – According to @viralheat the sentiment for The Office page is 56% pos, 12% neg and 32% neu across 59 msgs on Facebook
  • Company pages (ex: Facebook) – According to @viralheat the sentiment for Facebook page is 30% pos, 32% neg and 38% neu across 126 msgs on Facebook
  • Product reviews (ex: Canon Powershot) – According to @viralheat the sentiment for Canon PowerShot page is 56% pos, 13% neg and 30% neu across 82 msgs on Facebook
  • Current events (ex: Occupy Wall Street) – According to @viralheat the sentiment for “occupywallstreet” is 56% positive, 16% negative and 28% neutral across 231 Tweets
  • Product announcements (ex: iPhone 4s announcement) – According to @viralheat the sentiment for “iPhone4s OR “iPhone 4s”” is 44% positive, 17% negative and 38% neutral across 440 tweets

To know more about Viralheat’s latest offering, click here, and here if you want to download the plug-in.


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