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Social sentiment matters -- customer opinions, attitudes, and emotions -- rants and raves that affect corporate reputation, provide valuable market and brand insights, and help you understand and engage with customers.

Yet there are too many low-grade tools out there. Sentiment analysis done right is about much, much more than simply scoring tweets and reviews. Sentiment analysis done right discovers business value in customer, consumer, and constituent content and behaviors, whether online, on-social, or in enterprise feedback.

The Sentiment Analysis Symposium, May 8 in New York, is the place to learn more.  This is an authoritative conference that brings together experts and practitioners from research and industry. You'll have an unmatched opportunity to learn about state-of-the-art technologies, how they are applied, return on investment, and how to choose from among the many available options.

Options help you understand social conversations and also direct and indirect feedback (such as surveys, contact-center notes, and warranty and insurance claims), online news, presentations, even scientific papers: Any information source that captures subjective information.

Advanced analyses monitor and measure sentiment and often much more, linking sentiment to demographics, customer profiles, behaviors, and transactional records. They help business analysts (and marketers, market researchers, customer service and support staff, product managers, and other users) get at root causes.  These are the explanations of behaviors captured in transaction and tracking records. Sentiment analysis means better targeted marketing, faster detection of opportunities and threats, brand-reputation protection, and the ultimate aim, profit.

Social Media revolve around feelings, attitudes, and emotions. Facebook and Twitter are major sources of sentiment (and also of complementary social connectedness data). Facebook and Twitter accounts have profile data attached to them, but nothing that matches the detailed, usably-structured information you can find on LinkedIn. Google is the ultimate information-access engine, capable of bringing together information from a huge variety of disparate sources, including sentiment information such as product, restaurant, and hotel ratings, although when corporations wish to find, mine, and exploit sentiment they need to turn to deeper BI and analytics tools.

There's no one-size-fits-all sentiment solution, not Google or one of the several as-a-service solutions out there or any of the capable analysis workbenches or social-media analytics tools. Instead, there's a whole spectrum of sentiment sources and analysis possibilities.

These are a sampling of the topics that will be covered at the May 8 Sentiment Analysis Symposium. You will meet and learn from experts, strategists, practitioners, researchers, and solution providers - experienced and new users and those evaluating solutions. A sample of speakers for the event includes the American Red Cross, Fidelity Investments, Thomson Reuters, American Express, Kraft Foods, and the Wall Street Journal.

For a crash course on technology concepts, you should also attend the May 7, half-day Practical Sentiment Analysis tutorial, taught by Prof. Bing Liu. (Check out this profile of Bing that appeared in the January 27, 2012 New York Times.)

To register please visit sentimentsymposium.com/registration.html today. See you there!

This is a quick entry to tell you about three things --

- My free report, "Text/Content Analytics 2011: User Perspectives on Solutions and Providers," is out. Are you looking for business value in "unstructured" social, online, or enterprise sources? My report will provide background information and "wisdom of the crowds" guidance you can use. Download the report free via altaplana.com/TA2011.

- For a deeper dive into customer/market attitudes and opinions, check out the Sentiment Analysis Symposium, November 9 in San Francisco, sentimentsymposium.com. We have speakers lined up from Zynga, HP, Amazon, TripAdvisor, the Red Cross, and more. They'll talk about the role sentiment plays in customer experience, marketing, market research, quality, and other applications.  It'll be a great day for learning and networking!  (BeyeNETWORK & TechTarget community members should use the registration code BEYE for $100 off.)

If you're new to sentiment analysis, the optional, half-day Practical Sentiment Analysis tutorial, http://sentimentsymposium.com/tutorial.html, is for you. The tutorial precedes the symposium on Tuesday afternoon, November 8.

- If you'd like a broader view of the text analytics market -- technology, solutions, and applications, the Text Analytics Summit is for you. This year, 2011, we're going west, with a San Jose summit November 10-11. 

For a really rich experience in text, content, and sentiment analysis, why not join me at both conferences?

Please get in touch with any questions.

Seth, @sethgrimes

Data mining and market research consultancy, Anderson Analytics is beta testing a new text analytics software platform with two Fortune 500 clients. The platform, currently known as OdinText, is being developed specifically for use by market researchers. It is expected to be offered in SaaS model and may be commercially available as early as summer 2011.

Tom is a text analytics early adopter and long-time proponent. He was one of the first to apply natural language processing (NLP) techniques for ad-hoc consumer research although he chose to focus on professional services in the years when market-research oriented solutions such as Buzz Metrics and Cymfony (later acquired by Nielsen and TNS, respectively) first emerged. Tom is also behind a Next Generation Market Research movement and says that Anderson Analytics' solution is based on the firm's years of research and experience.

Tom has responded to a few questions.

Seth: That Anderson Analytics has been quietly working on developing a text analytics software product is a welcome surprise. How did that come about?

Tom: We've always done a little internal development to fill gaps. I've been relatively open about my opinions on the state of text analytics software in general, and that there are no perfect tools out there. It's more about selecting the right tool or combination of tools for the right job and then knowing how to use them. I realized as early as late 2005 that the software out there really isn't developed with the analyst in mind, and that developing something seemed to make sense. Text Analytics has changed a lot since 2005, and it will continue to do so. So I doubt it comes as a surprise to anyone following this field that we're now in development of something more elaborate. Our feedback so far has been very positive.

Seth: There are many text tools on the market, so why now?

Tom: Well I've spoken to market research directors at several Fortune 500 companies. Interestingly, most of them had similar experiences and opinions in regard to text analytics that I had. Many had tried, or requested proof of concepts from large vendors in the text analytics industry and had been underwhelmed by what they saw, especially considering the price tag. It was clear to me that there was still a lot of room for something created by those who both understand text analytics and the needs of market research professionals.

Seth: Will this be a stand-alone, do-it-yourself tool or part of a larger service offering?

Tom: Probably both. Initially an 'OdinText Lite' intended as DIY option, I also think text analytics can add value to some of the other offerings of full service research firms. We also envision slightly different modifications depending on intended use. This in my opinion is one of the major failings of what some of the other large vendors are offering, tools that supposedly can handle any type of text regardless of source. If you build something for everything, then how accurate and useful can it possibly be for a domain expert? In this case the intended expert is the customer intelligence expert, not so much the PR or advertising executive.

Seth: I heard you've already been approached by one large agency regarding some sort of investment or partnership?

Tom: Well yes. However, Anderson Analytics is well positioned to get a quality product into the hands of our customers. That said I do try to keep an open mind if someone brings something additional to the table which can add value.

Seth: Thanks, Tom.

Tom: We're on the Web at OdinText.com if readers would like to get in touch.

Facebook, LinkedIn, Trip Advisor, and Twitter -- social media -- are almost incidental, replaceable tomorrow if another platform proves more attractive, powerful, and agile. (Think AOL and MySpace.) It's content that is king, the message delivered via the blog/e-mail/news/forum medium, generated by corporations and individual producers, traveling a two-way street between them and information-consumer audiences, who in turn comment, repost, and remix at will. And it's Smart Content, the focus of a conference I'm organizing, that allows producers and consumers alike to find the greatest profit, however measured, in online and enterprise content.

The information governance concept, beloved by corporations and consultants, barely applies. It's a challenge creating standards and maintaining content-production rules, more a drag than a benefit, given the highly competitive, fast changing, almost chaotic content marketplace. It's semantic and analytical technologies, which help you find and exploit patterns relevant to your goals, whether expanding readership or automating sense-making, that allow content producers and consumers to keep up, to create findable, flexible, and reusable content and to generate business-linked insights.

Smart Content, the conference, is really just a next step in the BI/analytics/applications market education and match-making I've been doing for years. The opportunity is huge -- business and technical -- a consequence of the value content analytics can bring to news and social media and Web and enterprise content.

We'll cover a spectrum of approaches -- as applied in media & publishing, advertising & on-line commerce, marketing and PR, finance, research, and the Semantic Web -- enhancing the value of news and social media and Web and enterprise content -- with links to enterprise information management, content strategy, BI, text analytics, and search.

We'll start with Visionaries Panel with Dries Buytaert, CTO at Acquia and creator of Drupal, Natasha Fogel, EVP at Edelman StrategyOne, and Mark Stefik from XEROX PARC, followed by Jeff Fried of Microsoft explaining What Business Innovators Need to Know about Content Analytics.

We'll have talks by Rachel Lovinger, content strategy lead at Razorfish, Darrell W. Gunter, EVP/CMO at Collexis, and Randall Snare & Elizabeth McGuane of iQ Content, Dublin -- preceded by a series of lightning talks that will help attendees learn about the gamut of innovative smart-content solutions -- and followed by five Application Spotlight talks. Then stick around for a networking reception.

Smart Content will take place Tuesday, October 19 at the Executive Conference Center at 48th & Broadway in Manhattan. Learn more, and register today, at smartcontentconference.com. Register by September 10 for a $200 early-bird discount.

As my colleague Laurel Earhart, Smart Content marketing director, puts it, Smart Content is designed for decision makers, implementers, solution providers, and also investors. We're expecting great things to happen!

Lastly, I'm quite happy and appreciative to have TechTarget and the BeyeNETWORK as a Smart Content media sponsor, and the support of other prominent media and solution providers in the content management and analytics space. I'd love to have TechTarget readers and community members join us for what is sure to be an excellent program, due of course to the quality and expertise of the Smart Content speakers.

Please visit smartcontentconference.com for more information and to register. (Early-bird rates run through September 10.) Thanks!

Just a final note about the Sentiment Analysis Symposium, April 13 in New York. The symposium is a business-focused conference designed to educate users -- current and prospective -- on sentiment solutions for social media, public relations, customer experience, financial markets, and other applications.

I hope you can attend. We have a great program lined up. I'm especially looking forward to the lightning talks, a series of quick demo-presentations, and to "Selecting a Social Media Analysis Platform/Provider" with moderator Suresh Vittal from Forrester Research and social-analytics gurus Nathan Gilliatt and Marshall Sponder. Note that registration is 50% off for academics, government, and non-profits.

And this is a first note about this year's Text Analytics Summit, slated for May 25-26 in Boston. I'm program chair once again and will present an introductory workshop the afternoon of May 24. Please consider joining us!

Do get in touch about the conferences or anything else related to BI, text analytics, or sentiment analysis -- my coordinates are on-line -- or follow me on Twitter for updates.

Seth