Sentiment in Blog Memes

This post is part of a series on corporate blogs based on data collected for my Masters thesis and it focuses on sentiment in blog memes.

All 1,553 consumer blog posts captured by the study were tested individually and the result was a statistically significant skew towards positive sentiment. The chart below shows that 887 or 57.1% percent of posts were demonstrated positive sentiment. A further 33.4% of posts expressed neutral sentiment and just 9.5% of posts were negative.

Pearson’s Chi-Square test was used to determine if the skew towards positive sentiment was statistically significant. It was based on the assumption that if there was no bias, the expected result would be an equal distribution of posts in all three sentiment categories. The test showed that the observed result was different enough from the expected result that it represented a statistically significant bias towards positive sentiment in the data.

A positive bias among consumers responding to corporate blog posts creates some tension with research that suggests consumers do not trust corporate blogs. But, as social media becomes increasingly distributed, this becomes an increasingly irrelevant debate. Although, even if it is the case, corporate blogs serve other purposes.

Corporations are taking social media seriously and there are already numerous small companies creating tools to monitor online chatter, including sentiment, across multiple platforms and most include tools for companies to interact in these streams as well.

Sentiment seems to be a particularly alluring area and one that currently appears to be reaching a wider audience, but its viability remains passionately debated. Demand stems from a view of social media as a channel for customer interaction and word-of-mouth. And it results in a broad cross-section of potential uses for companies and professional company watchers in marketing and PR, finance, law, media, consulting, academia and more.

The sentiment data for this study was produced by the Parnassus Group, a social media research firm, using a custom configuration of their Sentimine tool. All articles were given a single sentiment score at the document level without targeting any particular topic or entity such as companies, products or brands.

In the next post in this series, I’ll talk more about sentiment among early posts in memes and the most connected posts in memes, which were the primary variables of my study.

Posted on September 14, 2009