Text analytics and sentiment analysis provide valuable tools for next-generation market research. Our aim is to enhance the insight-discovery process, by automating analysis of free-text survey responses, social posting, and enterprise feedback in its many forms. The aim is to understand emotions and opinions associated with companies, products, brands, and people, to drive better marketing, sales, product design, and customer support.

Automation — via natural-language processing software, crowdsourced analyses, and text data mining — speeds, broadens, and normalizes analyses. Automation can significantly lower costs and reduce time to insight. When we couple automated methods with behavioral analysis and psychometric profiling, and when we link text-sourced data to traditional survey and market-research data as well as customer transaction records, we gain even greater explanatory and predictive power.

How can these newer tools and methods be best applied to improve market research practices and results? I created a conference, the Sentiment Analysis Symposium, designed to teach you how.

In the run-up to next week’s symposium, October 30 in San Francisco, I posed a series of questions to four MR authorities, folks doing innovative work that is transforming market research. Their Q&A responses were so good that I didn’t have the heart to reduce them to short snippets in order to cram them into an article. What I’ve done instead is prepare them for reading, verbatim.

You can hear and meet three of the four respondents at the symposium, Kate Niederhoffer, Carol Haney, and Bill Tuohig. For now, follow the links behind the names below to read responses, on ways text analytics and sentiment analysis inform and improve market research, from —

• Tom Anderson, Founder & Managing Partner, Anderson Analytics – OdinText
• Social psychologist Kate Niederhoffer of Knowable Research (ex-Nielsen and Dachis)
• Carol Haney, Vice President, Product Marketing at Toluna
• Bill Tuohig, Senior Director of Social Media and Text Analytics Products, J.D. Power & Associates

So do read what our authorities have to say about sentiment analysis, text analytics, and market research, and join us next week in San Francisco.