3 Detours to Avoid in Retail's Race to Win With Big Data

Detour 3: Getting too social with sentiment. It's no secret that purchases stemming from social activity are skyrocketing, and everyone wants a piece of the pie. But the new trend of trying to pinpoint customers and make recommendations using complicated sentiment analysis and natural language processing isn't going to get marketers the results they want — at least not now. We're still at the very early stages of automating a way to extract feelings and meanings from social posts, and many of the methods are flawed or unproven.