I don't need to remind anyone of the volume of posts regarding the blogosphere's whipping boy: Dell. It is nice to see James Fee blogging about something interesting (innovative?) useful that Dell is (almost) doing (right).
Care for some cheese with that whine?
One of the significant technical areas that enables the type of automated analysis that we do at BuzzMetrics is the detection of evaluative statements in text. One thing that is noticeable about the relationship between negative statements and market positioning is that products that are positioned as commodities (by which I mean, for example, things like the Honda Civic - a good jobbing car, reasonably priced but not a prestige vehicle) skew negatively where as fancy-shmancy stuff, which many can't afford, gets lots of the positive mass. The thing is - it is the commodities that sell alot.
Now, I'm not defending Dell, and I'm not really interested in the whole Dell Hell story, but the analysis of negative statements found in social media is less trivial than one might think.