最近做了一次关于沃尔玛的品牌自动调查，总体来看，沃尔玛这个品牌似乎蛮受欢迎的，正面评价为主，褒贬指数达到正48，是相当不错了。指责抱怨也有，主要针对一些负面事件（狐狸肉冒充牛肉、对伪劣产品乱发合格证上架等）。进一步挖掘（drill down）发现了令人惊奇的现象：好话大多是网民自发的评价，而挖掘出来的负面信息几乎一律出自国家新闻机构（CCTV等）的报道。社会媒体挖掘的本意是自动民调，了解客户对于品牌和产品的意见，正式新闻有机构或国家宣传的因素在，是应该加以区分的。可是目前，这种区分还做得不好，很多有影响的传统媒体的新闻被反复在社会媒体中转发传播，与民意混杂在一起。
Some further analysis and findings:
1. The existing data are not very large (400k mentions a year), but the results make sense with decent data quality
2. From geos stats, we know most data on Walmart come from China (dark color) instead of overseas sources
3. From domains stats, the data actually include data from Sina Weibo (weibo.com) and Tencent Weibo (t.qq.com) although the data flow from these two important Microblog sources is not stable at this point. Also the domains stats show that the major domains are all from China. I know that Walmart is a very influential brand in China and has many stores in cities of China.
4. The net sentiment 48% is fairly high, which is reflected in the emotions stats （data quality very good）: big green fonts emotional terms include 放心 (piece of mind)，喜欢 (like)，乐 (happy)，支持/推 (support)，很好 (very good),不错(not bad)，成功 (success) etc. The negative emotional words (in small red font) are not many, including 差劲(bad)，抱怨 (complain)，不喜欢 (dislike)，垃圾 (garbage)，很一般 (very soso: meaning not as good as expected).
5. In the proscons word cloud, the likes include money-saving and first-class service; more interesting insights come from the dislikes, including (1) fake beef meat (using fox meat); (2) recall (some product?); (3) cheating; (4) scandal etc.
6. In order to drill down to see what negative incidents led to the above dislikes, the Walmart_con_sample shows some related sound bites which look like negative news on some incidents: 1st sound bite reports CCTV news on Walmart’s fake alcohol and fake meat (using fox meat) incidents; 2nd sound bite reports using fox meat to fake beef and donkey meat and using chicken to fake beef in the sold burgers at its Sam’s Club; the third sound bite reports three incidents of Walmart at different times and its apologies, including using cheap frozen meat to fake organic green food; using cheap fox meat to fake beef; and its lack of quality control in importing low quality products for sale, having issued 200 permits within 7 years for disqualified products to be on shelf.
7. Note that the above sound bites are selectively collected to show that our system can indeed capture detailed negative incidents of the brand in the media. When I drill down, there are quite some duplicates in our sound bites (one bad news gets re-posted everywhere); another thing is that the negative comments are not mainly from social media users, but from news (state-run news which get posted in social media too).
8. Unlike the overwhelming positive terms in emotions word cloud and the summary, the behavior word cloud shows more or bigger negative behavior terms than the positive terms. This is understandable because of the heavily reported incidents as show above in the sample sound bites. Eye-catching negative behavior terms include “revealed”, “take to court”/”being sued”; “closed”; “have to take off shelf” etc.
9. From the above negative behavior terms, I drilled down to see more details in the sample sound bites in Walmart_nag_behavior_sountbites.png, which is similar to the sample discussed in 6. These two sound bites both come from negative news of Walmart, originated from traditional news and got spread all over Internet.
中国新闻媒体对美国的跨国公司的负面报道跟民意没什么关系，倒往往由某种国际关系的大气候所致。当年为了打压谷歌，硬是给谷歌搜索按上了黄色监管不力的莫须有的大帽子，无视国内的搜索、视频和很多其他网站黄色泛滥到令人发指的露骨程度。欲加之罪，何患无辞。
不仅如此，最近还听说，由于中美相互指责对方利用网络偷窃情报，IT 业关系恶化，以至于谷歌和苹果等公司在中国遭到进一步打压，连做学问的信息利器 Google Scholar 都被封杀了。造孽啊，城门失火，殃及池鱼。