Traditional sentiment analysis is inadequate

Subjective opinions and feelings expressed towards your brand represent only a fraction of the information your care about when managing the reputation of your organization. Very often, online mentions of your brand will have an impact on your reputation regardless of whether any sentiment is expressed in the text. Consider for example the following sentence taken from a news article about the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010:

"Lingering oil residues have altered the basic building blocks of life in the ocean by reducing biodiversity in sites closest to the spill, which occurred when a BP drilling rig exploded in April 2010, killing 11 workers and spewing about 4m barrels of oil into the Gulf."

The sentiment of the above phrase is close to neutral: no positive or negative feelings or opinions are directly expressed by the author or any other sources, it is simply a statement of facts. However, the reported facts clearly have a negative impact on the reputation of BP, and obviously it would be extremely useful if their reputation management software platform could alert them to such mentions.

Traditional sentiment analysis is fundamentally useless in this situation.