Sentiment Analysis. Some might call it a Marmite metric.

As the old saying goes - 'you either love it or you hate it'.

Sentiment is certainly an interesting metric. One valued by many to gain an understanding of perceived worth, success or agreement. However, as much as it is valued by many, it is equally disregarded, deemed only as valuable as the data it is based on or too unreliable to take seriously as an indicator of any meaningful substance.

It could be said that the aim of sentiment analysis in business terms, is ultimately to allow one to understand the tonality of discourse around a certain subject area and/or entity? And so to make a judgement on the positive or negative perception of a company, campaign, event, product, brand etc that will, in turn, enable further strategic decisions to be made .

For many in corporate communications roles, the value in using sentiment analysis is that it provides much more substance than just the traditional metrics which focus on quanitity: volume and reach of coverage, numbers of shares/clicks, retweets, comments etc. It provides a view on the quality of the interactions between the public and press with your brand, company, product etc.

For sentiment analysis to be of value - at least in the case of reputation intelligence - it depends on numerous factors: the accuracy of the algorithms on which the sentiment analysis is based; the context of the topic or subject matter to which the sentiment analysis is applied; and the ‘protagonist’ or entity being analysed within the data set. It is the applied AI techniques and machine learning that then calculate all of those variables to provide insight to the person trying to find actionable meaning from the metric.

At Polecat, we understand that sentiment analysis can provide invaluable intelligence on the real-time reputation and impact of a company, event, industry, brand, stakeholder or communications campaign (...and more).

Sentiment analysis delivers insight into the collective emotions being expressed across documents, articles, social posts and other assorted media, that are at the heart of conversations driving the narrative around key topics and corporate reputation drivers.

Given its growing importance in analyzing corporate reputation, reputation risk, and reputation intelligence in general, Polecat innovatively combines sentiment analysis with its unique** Impact metric**. This allows our customers to view sentiment as the tone of discourse across the most impactful content mentioning them, their stakeholders, their competitors or other entities - narrowing the area of focus that our customers need to be paying attention to and therefore allowing them to prioritise their efforts in a far more efficient manner.

Our sentiment and impact insights combine to highlight relevant business topics that have the most significant reputation impact for our customers. We allow them to drill into the sentiment breakdown for each topic depending on how unhealthy, neutral or healthy the topic sentiment is - giving them access to the most impactful online articles & social media activity that is driving the tone of the conversation.

Polecat’s sentiment analysis capabilities are delivered using powerful NLP algorithms, and combined with our Impact metric, empowers organisations to make key strategic decisions that would otherwise take much longer to do so.

So whether you love it or hate it, why not get in touch with Polecat today to see how we can help you make sense of sentiment analysis in a meaningful way and take your understanding of corporate reputation intelligence further.