July 28, 2010

In the first half of 2010, General Sentiment took many positive steps towards the vision of becoming the industry standard in brand perception and media impact measurement. It's ironic that with this vision, our own brand operated in relative stealth throughout 2009. We changed all that in 2010, with the launch of our dashboard and reporting service. (Check out our reports page for a sampling of our Industry and Special edition reports released this year.)

Our goal has always been simple: To deliver answers for marketing professionals and executive decision-makers at brand name organizations. The basic questions we answer are:

1. Is my brand perception changing?
2. Am I making a quantifiable impact?
3. How do I stack up to the competition?

Of course, there's much more to it than that, such as identifying branding opportunities and providing market landscape analysis, geographic analysis, contextual understanding of the trending discussions, and so on. But we try to keep it clear, simple and actionable for our client base. We are able to deliver these answers by combining the most powerful and unique language analysis technology in the industry, with our team of brand management experts performing analysis and delivering concise reports.

Our most significant accomplishment this year was the launch of our Dashboard and Reporting Service. This gives companies of all sizes the opportunity to extract the most meaningful insights from news and social listening. We've also made some tremendous progress in our product, its visibility and our customer base during the last quarter. Specifically:

• We launched our Perception Value media value metric, which measures the brand with an eye toward the quality of content and exposure. This gave us the opportunity to produce a top-10 list of global brand winners and losers to add to our existing Impact Value rankings.
• We issued a variety of Media Value Reports in the second quarter. In particular, our reports on BP ("the Oil Spill Disaster") and Lebron James ("the Decision") generated an unusually large number of inquiries from prospective customers. We also received media interest, generating coverage in Techcrunch (for a second time), MediaPost and a host of other publications.
• We added several new customers - ranging from small to large and agency to corporate - during the quarter. I'm proud to say that two of these new clients are enterprise deals with Toyota, and Research in Motion (RIM), the maker of the Blackberry-line of smart-phones. With RIM, in particular, we are serving as an extension of its digital intelligence team. You can see more information on how we work with RIM here.

Information is power in any business, and our differentiation lies very clearly in our ability to provide an "edge" to our clients. The Internet is the greatest source of information and opinion in the world, and this becomes only more apparent with each passing day. As we process and store this entire corpus of Internet data, the possibilities to extract meaningful insights, for any market, are endless.

We have some extremely exciting projects in store for the remainder of 2010, including expansion to a large set of foreign languages and an effort to identify the cause-and-effect relationships among consumer sentiment, viral opinion and the financial markets. We believe we are well on our way toward our goal of industry leadership.

Until next time,

Greg Artzt
Chief Executive Officer