A 300 Year History of Text Analysis

Monday, February 15th, 2010

Social media research is this year’s big new thing. Researchers are all over sentiment analysis, text analysis, and content analysis heralding it as the newest and greatest thing to hit marketing research. You may be surprised to learn that content analysis is, in fact, older than my great, great, great, great grandmother. History buffs will enjoy this very short history of content analysis.

17th Century: Religious dissent: Text analysis and sentiment analysis were used by religious authorities to identify people who seemed to be using printing presses to share information that wasn’t related to the church.

1890s: Newspaper analysis digs in: In 1893, one of the very first content analysis of newspapers was published! This particular study attempted to demonstrate how publications were shifting their focus from religious and science topics to gossip and scandal (sound familiar?).

1930s: Newspaper analysis settles in: Before the internet and computers, researchers used to buy a copy of every newspaper and manually cut out articles on the topics they were interested. Someone might be tasked with cutting out all the articles about the current election. They would then manually analyze every article to identify the mood of the writer and the features of the article. With the changing economic climate, the 1920s and 1930s led to huge growth in content and text analysis. People felt the mass media were at least partly responsible for all the woes of the world. This was a great era for the development of both survey and opinion research, which most people are familiar with, as well as content analysis, which has mostly remained of interest to qualitative experts.

1970s: Survey research: Survey research really takes hold. You already know about verbatims and open-ends on survey questions. Multiple choice questions often have a place for people to write in an answer if they feel the question didn’t already include their answer. Those verbatims go through manual sentiment analysis and text analysis whereby people read each and every verbatim to analyze the mood of the writer and the features of the verbatim.

2010s: Social media research: And we arrive at today. We may not being doing text analysis manually anymore, but with one hundred years of solid research and learnings, the research community has amassed a lot of skill and experience.

If you are interested in reading more, Klaus Krippendorff, the leading expert in this field, has written many fabulous texts about content analysis. It’s a tough read, but a great read.

Who Cares if The Olympics are Almost Here?

Monday, February 8th, 2010

With the Olympics just days away, you would think that there would a lot of excitement in the air. We gathered over 30 000 opinions from across the internet to see for ourselves.

Just a few months back in August, about 23% of people expressed excitement and anticipation about the forthcoming Olympics. But, 75% of opinions expressed disinterest, and about 2% weren’t anticipating them at all.That’s not a good showing for a global event but let’s give folks the benefit of the doubt.

Maybe things have changed in recent days? We evaluated opinions from just the last few days to check. A few more opinions express anticipation now, but the rate has only increased from 23% to 32%. That still leaves us with about 63% of opinions expressing disinterest, and another 6% who just wish the Olympics were over.

Where are some of the negative opinions based?

• Unfortunately, some of the Olympic venues have been experiencing unusually warm weather leading to the trucking in of snow. This does not look good for an event that is trying to portray an image of environmental consciousness.
• People are taking notice of a TV ad in which Michael Phelps is seen swimming to the winter Olympics, a sport that only takes place during the summer Olympics.  Perhaps the intended humor didn’t reach the target audience.
• Some resorts have had financial difficulties and this could cause headaches for travelers.

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Regardless, let’s hope that the neutral opinions quickly sway positive and that Mother Nature cooperates.

The Conversition MRA and MRIA Roadshow

Friday, February 5th, 2010

Our CRO, Annie Pettit, will be making the rounds this summer sharing insight on social media research. Just last week, she presented a case study on how Ronald McDonald House uses social media research at the NetGain marketing research conference in Toronto. If you didn’t meet her there, you have two more chances.

• MRIA 50th Annual Conference from May 30 to June 2 at the Westin Harbour Castle in Toronto, Ontario (Marketing Research and Intelligence Association of Canada)

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• MRA Annual Conference from June 9 to 11 in Boston, Massachusetts (Marketing Research Association of the United States)

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Let us know if you’ll be there. We’d love to meet you!

Toyota’s Turn for a Car Recall

Friday, February 5th, 2010

After enjoying months of fairly stable consumer satisfaction, Toyota took their turn in the media with a massive recall due to potentially sticky brakes. We’ve gathered thousands of verbatims from across the internet to evaluate consumer opinions of the situation.

The chart below demonstrates the relative stability of emotions for Toyota since November 2009. Then, in mid-September, just as safety issues were being recognized, consumer sentiment towards Toyota took a nose-dive while the volume of chatter about vehicle safety burst out of nowhere.

How will this affect the Toyota brand? Well, 13.5% of people talking about trust issues still have faith in Toyota while another 12.4% do not trust Toyota. That puts a solid 74.2% into the neutral category, ready to be swayed. Can Toyota pull off a brilliant PR campaign? Will the dealers and repair shops have a good relationship with Toyota and pass that on to clients? The next couple of weeks will tell.

Do a Happy Dance with Online Shopping

Thursday, February 4th, 2010

Online shopping has turned into an everyday occurrence for many people. Whether it’s a fun Saturday morning activity or a quick peek online during the work-day, online shopping has become an easy and quick task.

We analyzed several thousand online conversations to find out how much people like shopping at different types of online stores. This chart shows overall satisfaction with online shopping at various types of stores ranked from the highest to the lowest levels of satisfaction.

Online shopping at pet stores received the highest scores from consumers, perhaps because people are in a great frame of mind from thinking about their non-human babies. Electronics stores are next in line in terms of satisfaction, likely because people who are talking about online shopping are early adopters of the electronics category.

On the other hand, jewelery stores received the lowest levels of satisfaction in terms of online shopping. This isn’t surprising as jewelry is one of those items that people need to touch and experience in person before they decide to spend any money. Discount stores, of course, are also at the bottom of the satisfaction list. Discount stores are known for low prices and this just can’t be accommodated once shipping and handling costs are added to the price of an online purchase.

So if you just have a few minutes to do some shopping and you’re feeling a little low, you might want to check out an online pet store. You’ll be happy you did.

Visa, Mastercard or AMEX: Did You Pick the Right Credit Card?

Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010

Most people have at least a Mastercard, VISA, or American Express card in their wallet. Have you even wondered whether you made the right choice when you got yours? We evaluated over 10 000 opinions from thousands of different websites in order to determine what people thought of each credit card.

It appears that Amex is the winner amongst the three with about 15% of opinions falling into the “Love” category and an additional 22% falling into the “Like” category. Next in line is MasterCard with a combined 25% of opinions generating a positive feeling towards the card. Last in line is VISA, with just 19% of opinions falling into the positive end of the scale. Fortunately, no matter which card you chose, no more than 13% of opinions registered a negative opinion.

So why is Amex so far ahead? Other than being called the favorite more often, consumers feel that it is better than Visa and Mastercard because Amex:

• Has better giveaways
• Is better for travel
• Is more trustworthy
• Has better public relations

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Did YOU make the right choice?

The iPad Story

Monday, February 1st, 2010

In the 24 hours that elapsed after Steve Jobs made the iPad announcement, we collected almost half a million tweets about the iPad. Using TweetFeel’s proprietary sentiment engine, we scored a sample of about 40,000 tweets. Then, we dove right in to take a much closer look at a subset. Here’s what we discovered.

Overall sentiment sat at around 60% positive. Generally, people have positive opinions about the iPad.  But, among the 40% of tweets that didn’t talk about the iPad in a positive light, the majority of tweets were related to the name and it’s associated feminine hygiene references. In addition, people felt that the lack of Flash, multi-tasking, and a camera were huge drawbacks. The most common negative opinion was that the iPad is just a big huge iPhone – so what!

On the other hand, the positive tweets mostly reflected generic comments such as “It’s awesome” and  “I want one”.  In other words, people don’t really know what it is or what it does, but boy do they ever want one.

In 2001, the iPod kind of got the same kind of chatter so only time will tell now!

Trading the Smell of a New Book for the Tech of an E-Book

Monday, February 1st, 2010

Just the thought of books brings to mind the sound of cracking the spine and the smell of fresh pages. The Sony Reader, the Kindle, the Nook, and now the iPad are threatening to kill, or at least decimate, that fresh new book smell.

We selected a representative sample of more than 10 000 opinions related to regular softcover/hardcover books and compared them to opinions related to ebooks. The good thing is that, for the most part, people don’t hate books. In either case, less than 4% of opinions showed a general dislike for books or ebooks.

On the other end of the scale, ebooks are winning the debate. Compared to 21% of opinions generating a positive opinion of regular books, almost 35% of opinions generated a positive opinion of ebooks. Of course, that leaves a lot of people in the neutral or indifferent zone, though 14% more people are indifferent about regular books compared to ebooks.

Why are ebooks winning? Even though regular books receive more positive recommendations, ebooks are seen as innovative, stylish, and sexy. People just want to try out the new technology.

As one person so elegantly stated, “The best books are serious investments, pleasing not only the mind, but also the eyes and the hands: with beautiful colorful covers, white, crisp-smelling pages, and dark, striking, elegant fonts.”

I hope ebooks look nice on the shelf.