Laugh, and the world laughs with you. Weep, and you weep alone (as the old saying goes). Or maybe not. Maybe no one weeps alone anymore, what with Twitter, Facebook, and the like.
This week’s release of a “sentiment analysis” product from Seattle-based Appature made me think about what’s really going on at the intersection of social media and semantic understanding of the Web. Appature is an up-and-coming, already profitable startup that has made its name in helping companies in the healthcare industry better understand their customers, so as to deliver more effective marketing campaigns. It has made inroads with big customers, like Johnson & Johnson and Microsoft Health Solutions Group.
Appature’s latest offering “allows marketers to close the loop between the pulse on the broad Web and their non-Web business in an immediately actionable way,” says Kabir Shahani, Appature’s co-founder and CEO. “It’s the linkage between the broader Web and the other information you already have about a customer or prospect, with immediate action built on top of this, that is the key here.” In other words, it’s not just about market awareness, it’s about directly driving revenues—by monitoring and understanding positive and negative feelings about brands, products, and other industry topics, gleaned from blogs, Twitter, Facebook, other social sites, and Web documents.
It’s a fast-moving trend, and there are now enough Seattle companies working on this kind of technology to put the Northwest squarely on the “Web sentiment” map. (I haven’t talked to companies in Portland, OR, yet, though Jive Software comes to mind.) Here’s how it all works, in a nutshell. If you’re a marketer, you can buy software to help monitor and summarize what customers are saying about your brand on the Web. If you’re a big company, or an individual with a reputation to protect, you can even do things like change the visibility of search results that pop up on your name. And if you’re a regular old consumer, you can keep track of things like what percentage of people (and who) are saying positive or negative things about the iPhone, Microsoft, or Kanye West.
That kind of software is exactly what Seattle-based Evri rolled out in August. Evri’s calling card is that it scours the Web every minute of every day, trying to understand the semantic meaning of sentences on Web pages and documents. What’s more, its software makes connections between all the entities (names, places, products) it encounters on the Web. The broader goal is to give people a better way to browse and discover information.
“One thing we do which is really different is we actually say who or what is expressing the positive or negative sentiment, as opposed to simply remaining ambiguous,” said Deep Dhillon, Evri’s chief technology officer. “One of the reasons we can offer these more involved capabilities is due to the depth of our technology stack—because we know, for every sentence, who the subject, verb, object, etc. are.”
Which raises the question of just how far along the semantic technology
