| Download the video (.wmv, 5.12M) Analyzing Opinions on the Internet The Internet contains a wealth of consumer opinion on a
variety of products in the marketplace. Chat rooms, message boards, Intranets
and newsgroups are rich, dynamic, global sources of information that are
constantly refreshed. But, searching for information about a particular product
results in a myriad of opinions—and not all of them you can trust. Even if you
could search for and find opinions about your company or product efficiently,
it is extremely difficult and time-consuming to analyze them meaningfully.
Businesses spend more than US$13 billion to conduct market
research about their products and services. A growing portion of that budget is
spent on Web-based research. Today, the Internet is vast, dynamic and very
influential in driving consumer opinion. Nonetheless, there are more than 550
billion documents within the Internet, most of which are unstructured. They
come from a plethora of electronic sources, in multiple formats, languages and
locations. Although organizations recognize the value of the Web, they waste
considerable time and resources trying to access information with inefficient
tools such as conventional search engines.
The Sentiment Monitoring Services prototype, developed by
Accenture Technology Labs, provides an easy and efficient way for enterprises
to gauge customer sentiment from Internet sources. Sentiment Monitoring
Services allows businesses to tap into the Internet—which consumers already use
to share honest feedback on products and services—and to leverage this
information throughout every level of the organization.
The Technology
Sentiment Monitoring
Services searches preferred sites or newsgroups on the Internet for opinions.
Using advanced language technologies, it interprets the sentiment of the text
towards a specified product or service and then provides the user with an
analysis of the results. Sentiment Monitoring Services combines a search agent
and a perception engine to present users with an instant gauge of market
perception of any feature, product, brand or organization. The natural language
processor of the perception engine achieves an accuracy of approximately 90
percent compared to opinion ratings ranked manually.
Sentiment Monitoring Services is built using various
standard software components to ease integration into existing IT systems. An
easy-to-use interface, with user-defined search topics and parameters, reads
any electronic content in multiple languages. Real-time responses are
summarized and the results are clearly formatted and easily repeatable.
The Implications
Sentiment
Monitoring Services provides accurate and up-to-the-minute information that
nearly every department in an organization can rely upon—from corporate
strategy and design to product development, marketing, sales and customer
service.
For instance, a sales person, distributor or marketing
executive can use the prototype to get instant feedback about a new advertising
campaign; a political group could get instant access on public opinion related
to global events; a product designer could access important consumer opinion on
a particular feature of their product.
By efficiently collecting, organizing and analyzing data,
Sentiment Monitoring Services provides companies with a competitive advantage,
helping executives gain real-time insight into information and opinions found
on the Internet.
uCommerce
Accenture believes that
as successive waves of economic and technological change converge, truly
ubiquitous commerce or uCommerce is becoming a reality—a new always on, always
active, always aware business environment. The ubiquitous nature of the
Internet, and the information it generates, poses great business opportunities
for those who can turn information into knowledge. Accenture Technology Labs
developed Sentiment Monitoring Services and other prototypes to demonstrate and
explore business opportunities that are created by uCommerce.
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