The government is poised to waste taxpayers money following the Cabinet Office’s approval of an “automated sentiment analysis” service that promises to help government departments find out what people are talking about online. Precise Media Monitoring claims to use “advanced text analytics” to quickly get “an idea of sentiment towards a subject“.

As Guido has pointed out before, current sentiment analysis software simply isn’t up to the job and anyone claiming they can provide it is a social media BS artist.  Any department who pays Precise Media Monitoring instead of using Tweetdeck (free) should prepare themselves for some rather negative sentiment…