Analytical Marketing with Collective Perception

Social networks, forums, and blogs are widely considered as a valuable source of information for many applications and in different domains. Being able to extract, analyze and use the knowledge, opinions, and sentiments the users share on the Web can become a competitive advantage for any company or organization. Specifically, information about the feelings and the opinions of the users of a Web community with respect to a product or a service can be useful for marketing. In this context, the concept of collective perception is gaining momentum as a way to process, evaluate and quantify the perception and the sentiment that a community of users share about a given phenomenon. In this work, we propose an approach, based on Fuzzy Logic and Sentiment Analysis techniques, which allows to evaluate, also in a quantitative manner, the collective perception of a Web community with respect to a specific product or service.