Politicians and candidates who are running for political office are always looking for ways to tell if their message is making an impact on voters. The usual way all campaigns do this is by polling voters through phone calls, emails, or online surveys. The drawback of this has always been that this takes time to collect and often does not get an extremely clear picture. A new software has emerged called sentiment analysis. This is passive software that simply tracks what people put on public sites about a political candidate. This gives the politician an unbiased view of his campaign, since it is simply what the people are saying about it, rather than a strict set of questions and answers distributed by the campaign.
There is a wealth of information on the Internet that if used correctly can provide valuable information for a political candidate. This information previously was left untapped since the software was not developed. John Hancock, however changed that. He developed software for political campaigns to mine data from the Internet. This software is an invaluable asset to anyone running for a political position. People often use the Internet as place where they can speak their mind freely, as many blogs and posting websites allow for people to use a made up name. With the protection of namelessness, people will often be more truthful about their opinions, rather than try and make them more pleasing to masses. By being able to mine data from these anonymous posts, candidates can get a feel for which messages are resonating with voters.
The uses of this technology are limitless. While as of right now only political candidates are using this software, after refining the software, I believe almost all companies with a marketing division will adopt some form of it. The advantage to being able to see what the consumer truly feels about a product is immeasurable. For a company such as Coca-Cola to be able to find out what its consumers think of a new product idea, before going through millions of dollars to simply develop a sample to distribute to the customer, would save them millions. Many companies use a large portion of their budget to fund marketing schemes, while many of them are often successful, some do fail causing a loss of millions of dollars to the company. This software would also allow companies to find out which marketing strategy is most effective.
There are a few drawbacks to this system though. Only a small number of people post their opinions online, and those that due are usually extremists to either side. This can lead to an overconfidence leading to either elections or release of product. Skewed results are also likely. Secondly if something in spread through mass messaging it would show a spike in either positive or negative sentiments, once again skewing the results. Additionally, the people posting online will not always represent the general public accurately.
While still in the earlier stages of software development, sentiment analysis software presents and new and interesting development in the way political candidates and companies collect data. By tapping into the resources available on the Internet, companies and candidates will be able to make more informed decisions on product development and political campaigns by seeing what the buzz is online.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/01/technology/01sentiment.html?scp=1&sq=John%20Hancock&st=Search
William Neubauer
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