Twitalyzer on The Art and Science of Tone and Sentiment in Social Media

In this final episode of the podcast with Jeff Katz of Twitalyzer we cover the tonality and sentimentality of automated analytics and how it still requires a good deal of human intervention.  Jason Falls / SocialMediaExplorer.com had a post about this idea and a great product / service from Sentiment360 – this is where this process is heading, at least for the near term.

Jeff observes that at least we can get some trending data from the existing tools, but the art & science of tone / sentiment analysis is still fairly human-centric and that organization would do well to put a person into the process.  The vagaries of language, jargon and the constantly evolving nature of slang will make this a task fit for human for quite some time to come. 

Where is Twitalyzer going and what’s keeping them up at night? The biggest concern for Twitalyzer is handling the continuing changes pouring out from the data providers, but they’re confident that the challenge is manageable and it is the work they are about.  Twitalyzer recognizes their part in answering the question of how social media is used for business and Jeff cites that social media analytics tools are at about the same place web analytics tools were about 5-10 years ago – growing fast and changing often.