The “C” Word

“Community” is a word used a lot now by businesses along with “social networks”. Everyone feels they’re important to success, but no one is sure what to do with them.

Jennie Lees has created a software for Affect Labs that can help solve this problem. This summer, at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Channel 4 is funding Affect Labs to search social networks, such as Facebook, Digg, and Twitter, to find out who’s saying (and feeling) what about whom.

The goal is to help theatre-goers to find what they’re looking for based on aggregated information. Based on key words, the software can list the most positive or negative phrases found about a show, venue, or performer by assessing the affect in the language it finds. Furthermore, participating venues will have access to an automatically updating star rating based on the values placed on the words and phrases.

If the software can do this for a theatre festival, imagine what it could do for a company wanting to know what people think of their brand — all over the web.

So if you want to know what to see this summer at the Fringe, check out the sites of your favorite venues and of Affect Labs’ FestBuzz site. We’ll have the url later in July. So stay tuned.