I first covered NetBase on this blog in June (see NetBase Provides Next Generation Semantic Technology for Brand Monitoring and Understanding) and was impressed with their capabilities then. Recently, I spoke to Jonathan Spier, NetBase CEO, about some of their latest moves and continue to be impressed.  They are supporting a number of use cases including: market research, brand management, advertising, PR, customer service, and sales, anywhere that social media insight discovery is required.

Jonathan said they are continuing to work on social media analysis. For example, their Brand Passion Index combines the concept of passion with sentiment to create 2 x 2 chart such as the one shown below that shows several TV news outlets.  This Brand Passion Index has created a lot of interest and they are providing new ones on a regular basis. Here is an example of their word cloud visualization that shows positive and negative themes connected to a product or topic.

To determine the passion measure they look at the language to determine the intensity reflected through the words.  They start with differences such as like versus love, dislike versus hate but they refine this through more sophisticated linguistic analysis.  NetBase has a team of eight linguists at the Ph. D. level leading the creation of these measures and algorithms. The results for these measures and others are created dynamically without the need for any pre-configuration or taxonomy development.  This allows you to better find new issues that you did not anticipate.

Some of the new features include the ability to explain pronouns such as “it” indicating what they refer to. I especially liked their comparisons of how different brands are discussed on the Web. You can pick a topic and the top five comparisons related to that topic are dynamically created as shown below.

You can also manually create comparisons and compare sentiment on competing products such as shown below.

This can certainly be addictive.  NetBase has picked up a number of customers since our last conversation. I asked Jonathan what were the biggest barriers they faced to growth. He said the first was simply getting the word out and they are working on this. Second, there remain some companies who question the value of social media monitoring but this is a decreasing number.   NetBase is increasing its partnerships with consulting firms to both help get the word out and to address any lingering doubts about the value of social media. I continue to be impressed with their capabilities and look forward to seeing their next moves.