Seven Day Workweek

According to some of the players in the social media monitoring field, sentiment analysis works and customers are happy with it. One question I haven’t heard though, is how does sentiment drive commerce. Does negative sentiment mean weaker commerce, positive stronger and so on. It’s a new game, so I understand that there is no numbers (yet) but what I don’t understand is how the industry has completely ignored the whole topic. After all, social media monitoring is marketing, and marketing has truly only one purpose at the end of the day.

To Drive Commerce (or not)

Corporations at this level are very focused with share value. So what better way to look at the commercial value of sentiment than comparing it to stock quote over same time.

According to one of the leaders in the space, Sysomos, the three brands with most negative sentiment around them in 2009 were:

1. McDonalds
2. Marlboro (Philip Morris)
3. Toyota

While the three brands with the most positive buzz around them were:

1. Samsung
2. Nokia
3. Intel

Last year was a tough year for everyone, the sample size is ridiculously small and to make things even worse, the companies are from different categories. Samsung is not traded in NYSE so I replaced it with IBM, who by the way is the biggest winner on the list. Another big winner, Intel has been very open about how they play. Or at least Michael Brito has, thanks! On the other hand, it looks like Nokia’s stock could have done better.

STOCK QUOTES FOR YEAR-TO-DATE FROM GOOGLE FINANCE

The official results for this little test:

1. IBM +55.14%
2. Intel +38.67%
3. Toyota +29.75%
4. Philip Morris +12.39
5. McDonalds +1.98%
6. Nokia -18.07%

It’s well worth noting that both IBM and Intel were coming from their 10 year lows at the switch of 2009, so a hefty rise for such juggernauts would not come as surprise.

This whole ‘research’ I have just conducted, is obviously complete BS and should not be taken seriously by anyone. But one thing it does well (I hope), is that it speaks loudly the question we all should be asking:

“What’s sentiment really worth?”

Also I want to put out the challenge to Sysomos, who obviously has this data from 2009:

It would be great to see this same test run category vs. category with a much larger dataset. It took about 5 minutes to get the data from Google Finance, and another 10 minutes to write this ‘report’ on the ‘findings’.

If it comes to that, we’d love to do this together with you and extend our helping hand. After all, since we’re in the insights business, we should do what we reasonably can. Things start to get really interesting, when we can run this test year to year. I bet a lot of this stuff doesn’t show instantly.

Connect with Me on Twitter!