Development of an online reputation monitor

MIng (Computer and Electronic Engineering), North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2015The opinion of customers about companies are very important as this can influence a company’s profit. Companies often get customer feedback via surveys or other official methods in order to improve their services. However, some customers feel threatened when their opinions are publicly asked and thus prefer to voice their opinion on the internet where they take comfort in anonymity. This form of customer feedback is difficult to monitor as the information can be found anywhere on the internet and new information is generated at an astonishing rate. Currently there are companies such as Brandseye and Brand.Com that provide online reputation management services. These services have various shortcomings such as cost and is incapable of accessing historical data. Companies are also not allowed to purchase these software and can only use the software on a subscription basis. The design proposed in this document will be able to scan any number of user defined websites and save all the information found on the websites in a series of index files, which can be queried for occurrences of user defined keywords at any time. Additionally, the software will also be able to scan Twitter and Facebook for any number of user defined keywords and save any occurrences of the keywords to a database. After scanning the internet, the results will be passed through a similarity filter, which will filter out insignificant results as well as any duplicates that might be present. Once passed through the filter the remaining results will be analysed by a sentiment analysis tool which will determine whether the sentence in which the keyword occurs is positive or negative. The analysed results will determine the overall reputation of the keyword that was used. The proposed design has several advantages over current systems: - By using the modular design several tasks can execute at the same time without influencingeach other. For example; information can be extracted from the internet while existing resultsare being analysed. - By providing the keywords and websites that the system will use the user will have full controlover the online reputation management process. - By saving all the information contained in a website the user will be able to take historicalinformation into account to determine how the keywords reputation changes over time. Savingthe information will also allow the user to search for any keyword without rescanning theinternet. The proposed system was tested and successfully used to determine the online reputation of many user defined keywords.Master