One Big AI Idea: Sentiment analysis
From surveys to social media, AI can help you understand how people think and feel.
Understanding how people are feeling is the basis of communications. That’s true whether you’re looking at social media posts about a new announcement or categorizing employee pulse survey write-in responses.
It’s also true that categorizing these by hand is tedious and extraordinarily time-consuming. There are a number of tools that incorporate sentiment analysis, but if you need a quick and dirty tool that can take in almost any kind of data, standard generative AI tools can step in.
As always, you want to be as specific as you can with prompts. Ask the AI to bucket sentiment into positive, negative and neutral. Or ask it to highlight specific comments that mention, for instance, your CEO or your DEI policy.
But, as with any AI application, you must ensure you are doing quality control. The AI is not perfect yet. I ran a test, asking ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot and Gemini to do a sentiment analysis on a selection of comments from this Wall Street Journal article on Meta’s decision to do away with fact-checking. All categorized the items differently; Gemini flat-out refused to do anything because it involved political figures. Copilot, in particular, seemed to struggle with the analysis, categorizing only two items as positive and seeming not to understand the instruction to analyze only top-level content. Claude had a difficult time understanding neutral sentiment. ChatGPT performed best overall, but when asked to do a deeper dive, highlighting comments that specifically mentioned Mark Zuckerberg and variations on his name (since some folks misspelled his first or last name, or called him by the casual “Zuck”), it returned some comments that did not mention the Meta CEO in any way.
The bottom line: Yes, this strategy might save you time. However, careful consideration and hand categorization are still required. Be cautious, thoughtful and ready to tweak based on your experimentation results.
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Allison Carter is editorial director of PR Daily and Ragan.com. Follow her on LinkedIn.
