For want of a better word, internet marketing is about to get a little bit ‘matrixy’. Just as the world collectively grasps the idea of a search engine with spiders and bots that crawl pages indexing data, along comes the intelligence engine. This uses a software agent worthy of being named Smith; it is emotionally aware and scours blogs, articles, tweets for sentiment data in online banter.
A social media consultancy called Sentimine based in the United States has developed a content analysis tool to follow trends related to a certain keyword and label them as favourable, unfavourable or neutral. This is being used to gather information about brand opinions so manufacturers and PR companies can determine whether the attitude towards a product is positive or negative.
While this may be a useful indicator of public opinion, other companies are developing emotionally aware software named JuLiA to moderate online discussions, and it has the power to remove inappropriate comments based on the emotional tone of the posts. While abusive posts are a bloggers bane, their presence at least represents freedom of speech, something that emotionally aware software agents will bring to a halt.
Comments that are one person’s tale of truth may well be another person’s taboo; and the presence of an agent that crawls internet content looking for offensive tones smacks a little of an Orwellian big brother style regime. I wonder what the emotionally sensitive software agents will make of that.
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