Web Marketing Research

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?