This week’s launch of the We Feel project – http://wefeel.csiro.au/#/ – developed by computer scientists at CSIRO and mental health researchers at Black Dog Institute – http://www.blackdoginstitute.org.au/ – to map the world’s real-time emotional state, is pretty crazy stuff. This easy to use emotion-barometer revealed some hair-raising emotional insights when I searched for stats on global love, lust, joy, fear, neglect and more. But in all seriousness, this is important work and the application of this technology in the mental health sector is what I’m keen to see play out, both domestically and internationally.
This type of mapping through the language of emotion got me thinking. Could Pinterest, as an archive of visual thoughts laden with humour and sarcasm, be used purposefully to gauge sentiment for brand marketing purposes? I’m talking above and beyond the menu of analytics tools available.
So, testing the waters, and analytics aside, I conducted a quick search using a few of the corporate standards. I was thrilled to see such honesty. These neat snapshots from times past and present are pretty powerful. They reflect satisfaction, dissatisfaction, anger, happiness, ideas and ideology. Emotions drive consumer actions on a daily basis. Acknowledging which are relevant to your brand at any one time, or tracking public sentiment about your brand over a given period, or being aware of the pre-dominant emotion tracked by We Feel to feed into a regional brand strategy, could be the missing link you’ve been looking for to really connect with your consumers.
Pinterest offers a library of emotional mood boards that if interpreted intelligently could enrich consumer-brand strategies when read alongside the insights drawn from analytics. Exciting times ahead for Pinterest and brand marketers on a platform where pictures really do paint a thousand words. Pinterest lists 18 brand success stories on its website. Etsy is one of them. Read it here – http://business.pinterest.com/en/success-stories/etsy
CHANTAL DEZARNAULDS 
There is an analytical tool available in google that allows you to select a word and it tracks the number of searches for that word tracked in time – so you can track when the british public lost interest in Madeline Mcann for example.
This is just the start of the “big data” revolution. The tracking by SBS of twitter during the World Cup was just a bit of fun compared to what media companies will do with these tools.