When the news that the SEC is suing Goldman Sachs for fraud broke last Friday, activity in social media picked up immediately.
And the online verdict was clear: The story is extremely damaging to Goldman’s reputation. Buzzient’s automated sentiment analysis algorithm constantly analyzes online sentiment from millions of posts in real-time. On our detailed sentiment scale, a typical value for a company like Goldman Sachs is somewhere between 0 and 15 — more or less neutral.
However, on Friday the sentiment values suddenly turned very negative. Goldman reached a -20, which is a value rarely seen for large brands.
Things were even worse for certain source types. Many financial blogs provided damning in-depth analysis of the case, which led to even lower sentiment values in the blogosphere.
On a typical day, only a couple of hundred social media posts mention Goldman Sachs. On Friday however, volume suddenly rose to well over 1400 posts, about seven times the normal volume.
Interestingly, post volume remained very high throughout the weekend. That’s highly unusual for business-related topics and shows how strongly the public reacts to these allegations.
By the way: The spike visible around April 7 was related to an exclusive CBS report on Goldman’s business practices. But the sentiment analysis shows that this report was discussed in social media in a mostly neutral way. It was retweeted frequently without an overly negative tone.
Most news stories only cause a short spike in social media activity that lasts for a day or two. The fact that the SEC lawsuit story led to so many negative posts four days in a row (and the fifth day shows no signs of abating) clearly shows that the Goldman scandal strikes a chord. Social media is an excellent indicator for public sentiment in real-time, and Goldman clearly has a problem on its hands.
