General Sentiment (discontinued) vs. User Evaluation

Determine what your research question or customer relations needs are to pick a tool that is a good match.

• Using volume and association metrics to assess and predict trends and emerging topics
• Use the articles metric to drill down into specific posts, such as tweets, Facebook, blog comments, news articles
• General Sentiment has the ability to access password protected sites to access information that may not normally show up in standard internet searches

• The application does take time to start gathering data on a specific topic. As such, its important to include as many keyword search topics as possible, and also be sure to refine them as you gather data.
• The user interface isn't particularly intuitive, there is some work that could be done to streamline its use.

Social media tools are constantly evolving. I would want to be sure that my research question was complimented by the metrics and options presented by the social media tool. General Sentiment is very useful and innovative and their customer service was excellent. Their sales and customer service team was very helpful in onboarding our staff and being flexible with our needs.

• Social media analytics can accelerate the speed with which researchers can investigate a topic of interest, at a lower cost.
• Due to the low barrier to entry (e.g., most social media sites and blogs are free), data collection burden, as traditionally defined, is significantly reduced or eliminated. The absence of direct interactions between researchers and the study population may do more to mitigate sources of bias compared to other more intrusive forms of data collection (i.e., interviews, focus groups).
• Used to to gather unstructured data and feedback from Medicare beneficiaries, caregivers, advocates, and other stakeholders to identify systemic issues that beneficiaries encounter.