Right around this time every year, a few thousand peoples’ salivatory glands uncontrollably start to get excited.  They know what’s about to happen.  It’s good old fashioned Texas BBQ time at SXSW in Austin.

We’re pleased to say that review’d co-founders John and Eric will be there in full force helping to get this awesome Twitter sentiment analytics up off the ground.  That’s right, at SXSW 2010 (the interactive part), we’ll be attending the usual conferences, strolling our share of 6th Street and handing out invites for a free Basic account for 30 days to fortunate trade show goers.

So yeah, I guess you could call that a launch.  We’re excited about it and can’t wait to share some of the latest enhancements to review’d with you.

It’s been a little while since we’ve been blogging.  So here’s a quick update to what’s been going on:

• review’d llc is official! That’s right, we’re registered up as a fancy pants limited liability corporation.
• Thank you pre-betas. A huge thanks to the handful of those who helped us out with a painful early pre-beta review of review’d – esp @benkunz and @stephfrancoeur. We have incorporated a significant amount of your feedback into the latest instance of the system.
• PayPal is on its way. We’re pretty close to PayPal integration, which will make signing up and using review’d easier than slatering BBQ sauce on your friend’s face at SXSW.

There’s a lot of other behind-the-scenes work too. Calculations, algoritms, etc.. we’ll keep it to the sexy stuff.

So with that, we hope to see you at SXSW.  DM us @reviewd or @ericfleming to meet up.  We have lots of free invites to give away!

What’s review’d?
review’d is this a brand new sentiment analytics service that is in beta right now.  It scours Twitter based on keywords and returns only the most important tweets that also express either positive or negative opinions with the statement.  The tweets are scored and then a assigned a review’d Score that is tracked over time.  With it, you can see and understand what’s working and what isn’t.  Adjust your social media and online marketing efforts and observe and quantify your results.

When can I start using it?
Soon.  We’re tracking a number of companies already and will be sharing some of our findings with you right here.  So sign up for the Feedburner feed and keep check back with us so that you can be some of the first to sign up.

What’s unique about what you do?
review’d is one of the first sentiment analytic services out there for short online communications.  We’ve been testing and refining the algorithm for a couple of months now and we’re pleased with where it’s headed. With review’d, you’ll get quality custom reports and a baseline score to help you keep track of how you’re fairing on Twitter. 

Yes, we acknowledge that there are some others out there doing similar things. review’d was built by people who needed its offering and did so without any start-up funding. Call it “by the people for the people” if you must…at the end of the day, you’ll get a whole lot more value out of review’d.

We’ll be constantly improving
review’d needs to be just as much you as it is us. We need your feedback in order to improve. So please know that we’re not so proud to think that we can’t do better. We’ll be constantly making adjustments to the system to improve accuracy and usability while still maintaining a solid baseline for you to track your social media efforts over time.

How do we send in our feedback?
There are multiple ways to make yourself heard. Share your comments here, follow us on Twitter: @reviewd or contact either of us directly at @docjohng (john [at] reviewd [dot] com) or @ericfleming (eric[at] reviewd [dot] com).

Who are you guys again?
John and I have been around the Internet for quite some time.  In John’s case, he’s worked to build the Web’s largest and oldest mental health and psychology Web site over at www.PsychCentral.com.  It’s seriously helpful stuff and after 14 years of publishing more content that you click on, it was time to apply some of what he’s been up to (from a technical and biz dev perspective) to help get this up off the ground.

In my case, I’ve been living and breathing the Web for more than 10 years with a media, PR, and marketing eye.  Most of this time, it’s been marketing and online community development through my experiences at a high profile start-up company. There, myself and a great team have worked to create social media sites, tools, and content while also developing and deploying some pretty cool b2c and b2b lead gen systems. Tack on loads of sweet branding and creative asset development and that gets us to where we are today.

I’m sure we’ll have more to say about ourselves and why we’re on to sentiment analytics.  For now, we’re pleased to flip the proverbial lever and welcome you to review’d.

What’s coming next?
We want to show you our stuff. Here’s a preview of a couple of topics we’ll be taking a look at over the next couple of weeks:

• An overview from around the Web with titans in focus
• MLB heads into the postseason
• NFL in full swing

~Eric