There was actually an interesting study done on quarterly earnings releases that...

There was actually an interesting study done on quarterly earnings releases that had some interesting implications as far as "soft data" versus hard numbers: http://ideas.repec.org/p/fip/fedgif/951.html

There was a company "Quant the News" that launched a product that did sentiment analysis on company related news, but their website no longer exists. http://www.crunchbase.com/company/quant-the-news