Collaboration tracks Twitter comments, online reputations

Collaboration tracks Twitter comments, online reputations

For businesses, maintaining a good reputation and effectively responding to customers can be daunting tasks. These things become even harder when that business is unaware of comments that are posted about it on Twitter and other micro-blogging sites.

IST Assistant Professor Jim Jansen is leading a team working to classify those postings in a way that will allow businesses and other organizations to monitor their online reputation more effectively.

Twitter and other sites allow users to post short messages, or “tweets,” about whatever is on their minds at a particular moment. These posts are automatically made public unless manually restricted by the user.

With so many opinions, good and bad, floating around cyberspace, it can be hard for a business or other organization to keep track of its online reputation. If done successfully, it also can be a great opportunity for brand management.

Jansen and research assistants, IST graduate student Mimi Zhang, and business undergraduate student Kate Sobel, are working with researchers at Summize to track perceptions of certain companies and brands on Twitter feeds. Summize is a company that searches and discovers the topics and attitudes expressed within online conversations.

Whenever someone enters the key word in a Twitter message — Starbucks or Penn State, for example — Summize’s software analyzes the comment’s context and gives it a rating from ‘great’ to ‘wretched’ using approximately 200,000 terms.

They will focus on, among others, Business Week 100 top brands as well as businesses that were newsworthy in recent weeks. Jansen and his team will analyze the results to determine how customers are reacting to that particular brand and  propose methods for businesses to respond.

“What is cool about this project is the very tight collaboration between industry and Penn State,” Jansen said. “This approach to brand management allows businesses to identify individual customers that might not contact them directly with a complaint or compliment, but might badmouth or praise them in public.”

The team also will supplement Summize’s findings with its own conclusions based on qualitative analysis. The collaboration does not require any research funding.

“We are looking for what effect Twitter and similar sites will have on brand management and how businesses can use this information to address individual customers in near real-time regardless of that customer’s location,” Jansen said.