Web Marketing Research
Hsinchun Chen
May 2008
1
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
2
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…?
3
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.
4
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?
5
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.
6
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
7
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 8
Marketing Tools: Research
Opportunities
• Need to focus on convincing business cases and
scenarios
• Need to provide good (understandable,
insightful) visualizations for results
9
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?
10
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
11
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?
12
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
13
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?
14
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.
15
EPinions.com: Research
Opportunities
• Excellent source for training English sentiment
polarity analysis algorithms – correlating freetext comments with rating scores
• Immediate experiment on English productspecific sentiment analysis algorithms
• Generic polarity analysis engine or productspecific 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?
16
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?
17