Welcome to Mixed Sentiment.

I’m Ben Ellis, a social intelligence strategist based in London, and I’ve spent the last 20 years working out what people actually mean when they talk about brands, culture, and each other online.

Here’s where the name comes from. When a sentiment tool reads a piece of content, it looks for the opinions inside it and judges the feeling behind each one: positive, negative, neutral, or mixed. Mixed is the label it reaches for when an opinion holds more than one feeling at once, when praise and complaint sit in the same sentence, when someone means two things and both are true. It is the most human of the four, the reading that refuses to collapse into a clean verdict.

That refusal is the thing I find endlessly fascinating: the gap between what a system can label and what a person actually meant. It is where the counting stops and the reading begins, and it is what this publication is about.

Social intelligence, the way I practise it, is the disciplined study of how people perform identity, negotiate meaning, seek status, and form perception under algorithmic conditions. The numbers tell you where the pressure sits. The language tells you what it means. I have a background in linguistics, and it still runs underneath all of it.

So that is what you will find here: the culture underneath the metrics, the language people actually use, the methods and tools of the trade, and the conversations moving the field. Some of it is technical, some of it closer to cultural criticism. It’s free, and it stays free.

Whatever brought you here, I’m glad you came. Have a read, and if you ever want to talk, or to work together, the door is open.

Ben K. Ellis

Stay up-to-date

Never miss an update—every new post is sent directly to your email inbox. For a spam-free, ad-free reading experience, plus audio and community features, get the Substack app.