Mining Social Media Via Sentiment Analysis

by Curt Hall

I've been researching the state of the art in mining social media sites, including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Yelp, CNET Reviews, Epicurious, IMDb, TripAdvisor, Yahoo! Finance, Amazon, and WebMD. Today, cutting-edge organizations -- especially their marketing and PR departments -- are struggling to make sense out of what's being said about their companies and products on a variety of social media sites, sites that are now responsible for incredible amounts of user-generated content. Basically, you can consider these sites interactive forums offering a wealth of information expressing consumer sentiment, preferences, and trends, which, in effect, are helping to shape consumer behavior.