Attensity, Palo Alto, Calif., has launched a semantically annotated social data stream designed to provide fast, detailed sentiment analysis from a wide variety of social media.
The Attensity Pipeline collects data from more than 150 million social media and online sources including the full Twitter Firehose, public Facebook and Google Plus posts, blogs, forums, and video and review sites. It uses the Attensity’s semantic engines to provide the analysis.
“The Attensity Pipeline is the first social data stream purpose-built for the needs of today’s enterprise organizations, going beyond mere data sifting to code every useful entity, relationship, event, and category in a document, and making that data immediately actionable for business users,” said Catherine van Zuylen, Attensity’s vice president of product management in a prepared statement. “Think of it as a unique barcode for every single tweet or other form of social communication.”
The company had recently used its technology to track public reaction to the recently released movie, Rock of Ages, starring Tom Cruise as a rock star to determine if sentiment was higher before or after the movie debuted.
The polarizing nature of stars like Tom Cruise and movie musicals in general, made the movie a good test candidate for the analytics capabilities, said Rebecca MacDonald, Attensity vice president of marketing. The positive sentiment grew more than 10 percent after the film’s premiere, which was unexpected.
According to MacDonald, a movie distributor could theoretically use social media sentiment information to adjust marketing campaigns prior to a premiere or once the film is in studios. If a movie isn’t generating enough positive sentiment prior to the opening, then marketing can be increased or shifted. If the debut suffers, the “now in studio promotions” could shift to highlight different aspects of the film, according to MacDonald.
Of course, even the most successful movies today tend to have runs of several weeks, so there is very little time to shift campaigns, MacDonald admits, though the information can be used to help improve marketing campaigns for future films.
Yet this kind of capability is seen as having more value for products or services that tend to have much longer shelf lives, as well as the reputations of companies themselves. The key is culling social media communication from millions of sources and presenting it in a timely enough fashion to be relevant.
The Attensity Pipeline has the power to do just that, and the firm is targeting the Forbes Global 2000, according to MacDonald. Smaller firms with smaller social media footprints might be able to benefit from similar technology from smaller providers.
The product has been in beta since the beginning of the year, with companies such as Jet Blue, Yahoo! and EMC using it, according to MacDonald.
EMC used the product to analyze real-time social conversations among the 15,000 attendees at the EMC World 2012 conference in May. EMC also used the technology in the company’s briefing center during the EMC-sponsored U.S. Open golf tournament in May.
“EMC views social media analytics as a strategic capability for understanding and communicating with our customers,” said Keith Paul, EMC’s “chief listener.”