I spent all day at the Sentiment Analysis Symposium, mostly listening, could not post or tweet as internet was down most of the day and by the time internet connectivity became available I was too absorbed in the material to want to tweet about it, etc.

The introduction by Seth Grimes was fine but nothing much stands out in my memory – Seth introduced what Sentiment Analysis is and some of the common ways it’s used along with issues of accuracy.

The first panel replaced a keynote (according to Seth Grimes) and featured Bradley Honan (StrategyOne), Greg Radner (Thomson Reuters), Brad McCormick (Porter Novelli) and Karla Wachter (Waggener Edstrom) – turns out Karla Wachter is a fan of mine and a long time reader of webmetricsguru.com (I just registered TheWebMetricsGuru.com which also now works) – the panel was moderated by Suresh Vittal (Forrester Research).  My impression is the first panel examined what is of value to stakeholders and what is the best way to present the data in a compelling way that gets action and buyin.   Greg Radner said the most meaningful thing to his clients was stock prices.  All the speakers had good ideas.

After a short break 14 or 15 pitches of 5 minute duration each took place -I uploaded a few to YouTube so you can view them below.

One of the best sessions of the day was Claire Cardie (Cornell University) talking about what business innovators need to know about Sentiment Analysis.   I found there are many levels of sentiment analysis and I picked up a lot of vocabulary.

I’ll cover the afternoon sessions, including my own, in another post.  I’d gladly go on by I’m so exhausted from a long, long day, I feel I would not do the material justice tonight.