The fundamental problem with social media sentiment analysis is that it is based upon the assumption that tweets are representative of the population. It ignores the issue that a large percentage of tweets come from spam bots.<p>As soon as you start measuring sentiment, there is an incentive for an interested party to try sway the results. For example, I could use a spam network to publish opinionated tweets just to obtain a headline in the media (E.g., "95% of tweets agreed with X"). The media coverage gives legitimacy to the manipulated result.<p>I wonder how many companies have set goals around this sort of sentiment. "Let's increase positive sentiment by 10%". An ethically challenged consultant could easily manipulate results to meet the stated goal.<p>There is still a place for sentiment analysis and that is in targeting individuals for follow-up. Assuming that the user can be matched to a real consumer, this avoids the issues of statistical manipulation. Though users can still exploit the "complain and get something free" loophole.