The visions of the proposed Linked2Media project is to tap into the vast user-generated content and interpret information posted on blogs, social networks and social media in Europe and beyond, ensuring that the European Commercial and Industrial SMEs will have homogenized access to the globally available online, social media information and data resources needed to perform, on their own, corporate brand reputation management and market sector repute analysis. In this way, the Linked2Media initiative facilitates European SMEs to listen to customers’ prospects and social media, but, more importantly, to identify trends and gain insights to improve their overall marketing strategy and return of investment.
As a result, the proposed Linked2Media initiative will facilitate the sharing and collective analysis of consumers’ opinion and experience, towards the provision of highly sophisticated online, social media reputation analysis and sentiment analysis services, helping European SMEs in the existing highly competitive market that they operate to manage the complex range of user-generated content published on several, heterogeneous platforms and decentralized Web sources, and make sense of the many linguistic issues that are prevalent in this type of content (existing typically on digital, social media). For example, consumers use different words to the say the same thing, and nowhere is this more problematic than in the blogosphere and in social platforms where the language is more conversational, rife with familiar expressions, so brief that context is difficult to discern and frequently filled with a collection of positive, negative and neutral statements inside a single post.