Report: Most online opinions about iPhone 5 were positive; many just sarcastic

Following Wednesday's announcement of the iPhone 5, there was some criticism that Apple simply updated a flagship product without being revolutionary.

Perhaps some consumers and analysts are just accustomed to expecting too much from the Cupertino, Calif.-based company. Still, it is all but a done deal that the iPhone 5 is going to sell well. Now whether it achieves a record number of sales in a certain time frame and/or meets Apple's expectations based on previous launches, that remains to be seen after September 21.

But despite some woes about a lack of excitement at the announcement, it would seem based on recent figures from social media analysis firm Crimson Hexagon that the iPhone 5 is resonating positively with many consumers.

Based on a sample of more than 1.4 million social media posts as of September 13, here's a glance at some of the analysts' findings:

• 38 percent of the online conversation was positive
• 31 percent of the sentiment was neutral
• 11 percent of user sentiment was negative
• The remaining approximately 19-20 percent of user sentiment was just humor/sarcasm about people purchasing the iPhone and the iPhone 5's features

But conversion from positive conversation to actual sales is a whole other matter as Crimson Hexagon reported only 13 percent of these users said they plan to purchase the device.

This is worth comparing to Crimson Hexagon's figures from the day before the launch on September 11. With a sample size of 600,000 conversations in the mix, analysts found that 41 percent of the online conversation was positive. Approximately 40 percent was neutral and 19 percent was negative.

While the difference in overall percentages is slight, it reflects how high expectations are for Apple these days -- not to mention room for making fun of all the hype surrounding these product announcements as well.

For reference, the data was collected using Crimson Hexagon’s ForSight technology, which the company says has full access to Twitter’s firehose, allowing Crimson Hexagon to analyze and derive sentiment from social conversations. The ForSight platform is refined by bringing human judgment into each equation by incorporating a "teachable" algorithm that is supposed to analyze and determine the intended meaning behind the words.

Screenshot via Crimson Hexagon