Oriol Gifra

As Google is making continuous improvements in its rank factors algorithm, probably we will see by 2012 a huge improvements on semantic technologies focused to understand consumer sentiment. 

Google is already working on reading social networks comments to learn and make relations between what’s being said in those conversations and brands, products, people…  The latest news came recently from Matt Cutts, fom Google, who said Googlebot already was able to index dynamic comments.

The next step is to improve relations between comments and type of sentiments described. Seth Grimes, an analyst strategist from Washington answer interesting questions in a recent article about The Future of Sentiment Analysis. He thinks still there is a lot to do to improve the SMA we have today, but companies like Radian6 are on the way.

Seth Grimes describe here what he looks in a Social Analysis Tool.  For him sentiment analysis is a set of methods, typically (but not always) implemented in computer software, that detect, measure, report, and exploit attitudes, opinions, and emotions in online, social, and enterprise information sources.

Google is already conducting a sentiment analysis for social media profiles such Twitter profiles or Google +1. Tools like Sharedcount can give you some idea of what is Google accounting. Along with that data, Google is also using its semantic technology to work in sentiment analysis.  

Online Reputation Management (ORM) will become much more important in 2012, as sentiment will be probably one of the most important ranking and quality factors for next year Google algorithm improvements.

We will see new Start Ups, like Bananity (coming online officialy next 23th November 2011) as online communities based on love & hate relations, or the sentiment analysis applied to journalism, as for instance what did Boston Globe with the Red Sox players and coaches popularity based on Twitter conversations. 

It will obviously impact on SEO, as the ranking factors will be more difficult to work… because sentiments are not something you can optimize fast, aren’t it?.

Marketing is now more than ever sentiment centric!