1 Web Marketing Research Hsinchun Chen May 2008

2 Overview Sentiment index: Michigan Consumer Sentiment Survey, BrandIndex.com Marketing tools: MarketTools, TrendIQ, Passenger Web sentiment and opinion: Blogspot, eBlogger, Technorati, ProgrammableWeb.com, Epinions.com Web marketing research opportunities

3 Michigan CSI University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Survey, since 1952 (monthly) 500 telephone interviews in the US per month Five questions: –Q1…financial…better off/worse off than a year ago…? –Q2…a year from now…better off/worse off financially…? –Q3…business conditions in the country…good times/bad times financially…? –Q4…country as a whole…next five years…good times or unemployment…? –Q5…big things people buy for their homes…now is a good time to buy…?

4 Michigan CSI (cont’d) Index of Consumer Sentiment (ICS): Q1-Q5 Index of Current Economic Conditions (ICC): Q1 and 5. Index of Consumer Expectation (ICE): Q2-4.

5 Michigan CSI: Research Opportunities Automated Web collection and sentiment analysis of consumer confidence What forums, blogs, etc. to collect, and where? Experimental validation (correlation) of historical Michigan CSI vs. past sentiment of Web blogs and forums Experiment on world events-Web sentiment correlation Company Web sentiment index (based news, blogs, forums) vs. stock performance? Contrarian Sentiment Index for stock prediction?

6 BrandIndex.com A UK-based company; tracking over 1,100 consumer brands across 32 sectors on a 7-point scale Based on 2,000 online interviews/surveys per day from a panel of 200,000 (polling research) Seven points: buzz, general impression, quality, value, satisfaction, recommend, corporate reputation.

7 BrandIndex.com: Research Opportunities Web-based collection and sentiment analysis of product comments (news forums, blogs) Correlating with breaking news and events on products and companies Correlating with Epinions.com consumer sentiment evaluations Automating analysis of specific critiques of products and reasons

8 Marketing Tools Most companies developed online survey and marketing analysis tools for companies MarketTools: Online survey tools and communities; claim to have Internet text analysis ability for 50M sites (no evidence) TrendIQ: Analyze market shares, buzz trends, sentiment scoring, relationship ID, Internet share analysis, etc. Some graphing tools; but little evidence of capabilities or success (web site and results un-impressive) PeopleTrend.com: Powered by TrendIQ, Presidential Election Heat Map, CEOs of large company (un-impressive) Passenger: builds online branded communities

9 Marketing Tools: Research Opportunities Need to focus on convincing business cases and scenarios Need to provide good (understandable, insightful) visualizations for results

10 Web Sentiment and Opinions Many blog creation and hosting sites eBlogger: blog creation WordPress, Blogspot Where to find top bloggers in selected topics? Where to identify major forums for product, company, event, etc. opinions?

11 Technorati.com Many useful blog resources and data: Top 100 blogs, Top Tags, Popular, Ping, Widgets, Watchlist, Photos, Videos, etc. Blog directory grouped by topics, including: business, economy, stocks, sports, consumer products, health, politics, etc. Top news, videos, movies, etc. Top Tags for each blog (tag cloud) Automatic Ping support Mentions of tagged topic by day Widgets: blog searching and info, pinging

12 Technorati.com: Research Opportunities Automatic spidering of top blogs and contents by topics Pining of new contents Promising for products, companies, politics, health topics, environmental issues Trackback of popular blogs to develop social networks of communities How about international, multilingual blogs, e.g., Taiwan, Japan, Arabic, etc.? How about analysis of popular vidoes and tags for specific products?

13 ProgrammableWeb.com A major hub for Web Mashups; More than 650 Web APIs and 2700 Mashups; API Directory, Mashup Directory, Market Trends, Major Players Top Mashup Tags grouped by category Web 2.0 API Directory grouped by category, e.g., advertising, news, sports, health, maps, etc. Some major APIs: Financial APIs (25), News (10), Government (13), Medical (5), Shopping (32), Sports (5), etc. Each API site has detailed API information and examples for implementation. Most popular Mashups; Searching tag cloud

14 ProgrammableWeb.com: Research Opportunities Excellent site for identifying data sources for various applications, e.g., business, sports, medical, etc. Good integration of data sources and visualization for web What data/web mining opportunities?

15 EPinions.com A service of Shopping.com (an EBay company); Members are paid to provide quality, meaningful web reviews/comments for various product categories; use Web of Trust (of trusted people) Reviews are grouped by category, e.g., computers, cars, cameras, personal finance, sports, etc. Most reviews contain Rating (overall 1-5 and sub-categories), Pros, Cons, and free-text comments (specific to product) Reviews also link to product information, e.g, specs, pricing, vendors, etc.

16 EPinions.com: Research Opportunities Excellent source for training English sentiment polarity analysis algorithms – correlating free- text comments with rating scores Immediate experiment on English product- specific sentiment analysis algorithms Generic polarity analysis engine or product- specific polarity analysis engine? How to identify product feature like/dislike and reasoning based on product specs information (what do you like about this)? What about other languages, e.g., Taiwan, Arabic, etc. What about sentiment visualization?

17 Future Directions How/where to identify Web data sources for various topics (business, company, product, health, politics, environment)? What are the major news sources, forums, and bloggers? Need to develop and test sentiment analysis algorithms for various topics Need to focus on selected topics: company/product, environment, politics, health How about Taiwanese and Arabic contents? How about visualization?