Briefs

Text Analytics Provider Introduces Social Media Analysis Tool for Marketers to Manage Online Opinions

BOSTON, Mass. June 1, 2009 - Teragram, a division of SAS Institute Inc. and the leading provider of multilingual natural language processing technologies, today announced the launch of its Sentiment Analysis Manager (SAM), a social media analysis tool that computes the sentiment of digital text and captures relevant information that enables brand managers to see what their end-users are writing about their products. Teragram is launching SAM to bring its self-developed search technologies to marketing professionals to help them better manage their brand�s image in the consumer market.

"The amount of online data from social media, such as blogs and message boards, is growing at a rapid rate," said Fern Halper, partner at Hurwitz & Associates. "The introduction of the Sentiment Analysis Manager indicates that Teragram understands the value of mining this content in order to gauge brand reputation. Increasingly, companies are looking to these kinds of solutions in order to remain competitive."

In keeping with Teragram�s practice of providing automated, customizable tools to what are normally manual and error-prone processes, SAM is the industry�s first hybrid system that combines both a statistical method for computing reviews as well as a rules based approach that lets brand managers evaluate specific terms and syntaxes.

SAM automatically computes the review sentiment from mainstream sites such as Amazon and Overstock, as well as social media outlets like blogs and Twitter messages, and captures the overall opinion of the combined assessments. SAM also analyzes the number of stars in a product rating to extract the general consumer reaction to that product, and searches and evaluates both positive and negative phrases in reviews for a more detailed breakdown of these online evaluations. Users can extrapolate this information from SAM to create color-coded graphs to understand exactly what these online posts mean in terms of the overall tone of coverage of their brand.

For more information, visit www.teragram.com/solutions/