Publications

Getting Sentimental About Analytics

BY Shane Atchison, March 22, 2007

How do you feel?

I know you clicked through to this column from somewhere else. I can learn all sorts of things from analyzing your behavior on this site, but I have no idea what you're feeling. Are you happy or angry right now? Will you feel differently after you read this column? Perhaps you'll go blog about what you read here and express exactly how you feel.

Welcome to the next great analytics frontier: customer sentiment. As we push the limits of data-driven clickstream analysis to the max, there are new opportunities to get into visitors' heads and better serve their needs. The advent of social media and user-generated content -- Web 2.0 -- has created great examples of people expressing their opinions online. Those opinions have real business impact. There are some powerful tools (e.g., Nielsen BuzzMetrics, Visible Technologies) available to track these discussions and measure sentiment. The missing element, however, is tying this all back to site behavior. If someone writes a glowing (or negative) blog post in the morning then visits your site in the afternoon, what exactly does that mean for your brand?

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