A Look Back at When Pegasystems Bought an Indian Social Analytics Company
According to the Boston Business Journal, Cambridge-based Pegasystems has acquired MeshLabs. The thinking was to expand Pegasystems and its means of crawling the web and pulling Twitter data.
Pegasystems’ technology could extract tweets mentioning certain companies. But it was unable to filter anything beyond that. Purchasing MeshLabs, enhanced this ability.
Now, according to the article, “a social media post can be analyzed to figure out how viral it could go based on the social influence of the user, among other things.”
What Did it Mean?
In the areas of social mention and sentiment analysis, this kind of more granular filtration is key. To simply see where and when a certain phrase has been mentioned online is all well and good. But the absence of context makes such captured data virtually useless.
Let’s say you mention the New York Mets one thousand times in the New York Times in 2014. But that vanity metric does not say much. Are these a lot of mentions? A few? Average, more or less? So who knows?
Then there is the matter of sentiment analysis. Are the mentionings, overall, positive? Or are they negative? Or are they, perhaps, merely neutral? Why does this all matter? It matters, in part, because we marketing types want to know if the general public loves us.
Except when considering whether a post will go viral, strong sentiments seem to have a better chance. These strong sentiments are positive and uplifting, or they are outrage and complaints. Without understanding the emotions within a post (if any), you can’t know if a bit of content will go viral.
This combination of different types of software promises exciting information, in the field of social sentiment analysis. I’d stay tuned if I were you.
Eight years later, Pega still exists…