Chatterscope: A New Twitter Sentiment Monitoring Tool
Believe it or not, there might be people talking about you and your brand on Twitter, and you don’t always “catch” these conversations. Now Lewis PR has a solution to solve this problem, and they named it Chatterscope. It’s not for a case of advanced Twitter paranoia, it is a tool that tracks mentions on Twitter and automatically analyzes and classifies the sentiment within each tweet, through sentiment analysis algorithms that identify positive or negative mentions of a brand. Chatterscope also provides historic trend analysis of those mentions, and alerts, helping you monitor Twitter and respond swiftly to events, without devoting your constant attention nor being deluged by general mentions.
We didn’t have the chance to test this service yet, unfortunately. Graphs are being displayed after Chatterscope has tracked brands for 5 days, and we just set up an account. We will come back with an in depth review after a while. But the registration process was fast and uncomplicated, and setting up the brands to track was easy as well. Inside the user control panel, the developers paid enough attention to details: the interface is discoverable, intelligent, straightforward and easy to use.
There was one thing we could use right away, Chatterscope’s Twitter search engine, which appeared rather slow in finding results. After three minutes of pointless waiting we tried a different brand, and this time things worked smoothly. Unfortunately, what they identified as a negative sentiment was a tweet by @traveltrunk promoting a 45% sale, leading to this page. The tweet “Expedia – Up to 45% off all-inclusive resorts: You work hard every day: you’re a slave to your boss, you clean you… http://bit.ly/ajzeWs” has no negative words in our view, but the word “slave” is in Chatterscope’s list of negative terms.
There will always be limitations to sentiment analysis technologies, especially working with keyword proximity algorithms. But even so, Chatterscope is a handy tool, that can be used mainly to get alerts and respond in real time to brand mentions, and also to monitor competitors. The service is now free. A premium version with more features will soon be released, that will include manual adjustment of sentiment classification, benchmarking against industry peers and more detailed and customisable visualisation of results.
