Social sentiment matters -- customer opinions, attitudes, and emotions -- rants and raves that affect corporate reputation, provide valuable market and brand insights, and help you understand and engage with customers. Yet there are too many low-grade tools out there. Sentiment analysis done right is about much, much more than simply scoring tweets and reviews. Sentiment analysis done right discovers business value in customer, consumer, and constituent content and behaviors, whether online, on-social, or in enterprise feedback. The Sentiment Analysis Symposium [http://sentimentsymposium.com], May 8 in New York, is the place to learn more. This is an authoritative conference that brings together experts and practitioners from research and industry. It’s a great fit for the Social Media Club community. You'll have an unmatched opportunity to learn about state-of-the-art technologies, how they are applied, return on investment, and how to choose from among the many available option.

Social Media, after all, revolves around feelings, attitudes, and emotions. Online and social conversations are major sources of sentiment (and also of complementary social connectedness data). There's no one-size-fits-all social-sentiment solution, not Google or Radian6, NetBase, Attensity, or Visible Technologies or other installed or as-a-service solutions out there. There are many capable analysis workbenches and social-media analytics tools that will help you make use of a spectrum of sentiment sources and analysis possibilities.

Turning social sentiment into business advantage – for customer service and support, marketing and market research, product design and quality – is the core topic of the May 8 Sentiment Analysis Symposium. Attendees will meet and learn from experts, strategists, practitioners, researchers, and solution providers - experienced and new users and those evaluating solutions. A sample of speakers for the event includes the American Red Cross, Fidelity Investments, Thomson Reuters, American Express, Kraft Foods, and the Wall Street Journal. For a crash course on technology concepts, also consider attending the May 7, half-day Practical Sentiment Analysis tutorial, taught by Prof. Bing Liu. (Prof. Liu was profiled in the January 27, 2012 New York Times, in an article titled “For $2 a Star, an Online Retailer Gets 5-Star Product Reviews”).

When you register, please use the code SMC for $100 your symposium registration. See you there!