Last week I gave a talk on “The Future of Text Analytics” at the Text Analytics Summit in San Jose, California. And while futurecasting is usually a subject for December blog reflections, I figured since Starbucks has already rolled out the Red Cups, it would be appropriate to share with you some of my thoughts on the subject in November.

One of the major trends in text analytics that has become apparent is that practical applications are driving a lot of the innovation. I think digital marketing expert Mike Moran said it best in 2008: “The future of text analytics is that the kinds of applications that are newsworthy now will become mainstream in the future.”

And there are lots of applications out there. Just a look at the agenda for the Text Analytics Summit gives a pretty good snapshot. From forecasting markets to policing social networks, to routing social media communications, to voice of the customer analytics and beyond – it seems if you can dream up an application, you can dream up a way to make that application better through the use of text analytics.

Of course, all of this innovation also brings new challenges on the technical and business fronts. For example, the growth of social media as a source for analysis has resulted in a two-fold challenge: managing the costs of ingesting and processing all of that data, as well as developing new ways to make sense of it. Interpreting “social speak” not only means making sense of abbreviations, emoticons and phonetic spelling, it also means you need to be aware of recent cultural events. A sentence like “I feel Kardashianed about Klout” requires the reader to have a knowledge of both Klout and Kim Kardashian’s recent short marriage – IE, this translates to “I’m SO OVER Klout”.

The growing globalization of business brings another challenge. As business analytics consultant Meta Brown said, “The pressure is on to analyze text written in languages that the analyst cannot read.” For a company headquartered in the U.S., but with customers who speak many different languages, this means you have several options. Do you translate everything and then process it in English? Do you process text in its native language and then present the results in English? Or do you hire analysts in each country that do pure native language analysis and then roll up that analysis in a BI application that synthesizes the fields?

Plus, as text analytics applications expand to more companies and more users, there is a lot more room for misinterpretation as well as more need for customer education. For example, it used to be that customers looking for “sentiment analysis” were looking for simple things like “I hate your product” (negative) or “I love your product” (positive). But now, you’ve got customers who want “sentiment scores” (“I love” = +3, “I like” = +1, “I kinda like” = ???). And you’ve got customers who define sentiment not in terms of positive and negative emotions, but positive and negative events – for example “I sold my LR3 and bought a Leaf” might be called “positive” event for Nissan, and a “negative” event for Land Rover.

Perhaps the most interesting challenge for me personally lies in applying text analytics to routing and other “process-based” applications. Whereas getting it 90% right might be ok for some reporting applications, when you’re looking at passing individual messages to a contact center agent or other process, you need far greater accuracy. This includes balancing recall vs. precision (would you rather deal with more “noise” or “never miss a tweet”?) and understanding language nuances (there is a big difference between “I think you should close your account”, “I’m closing my account if someone doesn’t call me back within an hour”, and “I closed my account yesterday”).

What do you think are the challenges in the year ahead? Will applications continue to drive innovation, or will pure play vendors lead the way? What corporate goals do you have for 2012 in which text analytics can play a part?

Attensity is excited to introduce our new Hospitality Industry Solution today, the latest in our growing portfolio of vertical market solutions. The new solution is designed to enable hotels, resorts and related businesses to mine unstructured customer conversations in social media, online review sites, surveys, emails, forums and other sources for valuable business insights, and use those insights to improve the guest experience at their hotels.

Today’s travelers are increasingly turning to online communities and social networks to share their opinions, ask for recommendations and give feedback on their hotel experience. The Attensity Hospitality Solution will help industry executives incorporate customer feedback into key business decisions, such as which property upgrades will have the most impact on the customer experience. The new solution draws on Attensity’s experience with hospitality industry leaders such as  Starwood Hotels & Resorts, one of the world’s largest hotel and leisure companies; Travelocity, the leading provider of consumer-direct travel services; and Travelodge, the third biggest hotel chain in the United Kingdom.

Available now, the Attensity Hospitality Solution is an add-on module to Attensity Analyze 6.0, and includes prebuilt reports, analytics and dashboards specifically tailored for the hospitality market, including:

• New groundbreaking reports that analyze the growing consumer demand for hotels with sustainability and green initiatives;
• Hotspotting reports that go beyond simple keywords to identify complex emerging issues;
• Top Compliments and Complaints;
• Competitive Analysis;
• Facebook Analytics;
• Net Promoter Reports;
• Multi-channel Analysis;
• Sentiment Analysis;
• Trend Analysis
• And more.

Here’s a preview of some of the out of the box reports available with the solution:

Facebook Marketing Campaign Analytics

Attensity Analyze now includes our Facebook Analytics module, which lets marketers analyze detailed customer feedback on Facebook. As you can see here, customers of the Hampton hotel brand have very positive things to say about the hotel chain’s comfortable beds, breakfasts and “bold” coffee, and warm cookies,  among other things.

Competitive Analytics Report

The competitive analytics report in this case shows how social customers prioritize different amenities at different hotels within the same Hyatt brand. You can also analyze social conversations across different competitors in your industry.

Hospitality Hotspotting Trend Analysis Report

Hotspotting reports are useful for identifying emerging trends in social conversations. Unlike common keyword based approaches, Hotspot reports identify issues you may not already know about, as they emerge. In this case there is a clear hotspot being generated in conversations by one hotel’s lack of hot water at one of its properties.

To learn more about the detailed use cases behind these and other reports available in the Attensity Hospitality Solution, register for our upcoming complimentary webinar with Director of Industry Solutions James Purchase on November 30th at 11:00 am PST. Click here to register.

Volkswagen surpassed all automakers in the last year in terms of sales and became the largest auto manufacturer in the world.  Now this spot is not one that will be held by them for long. Toyota held the spot for years, but with the backlash from the break issues last year, combined with the earthquake and Tsunami, both production and sales went down, leaving the opening for others. Maybe an American automaker would rise again? Not so fast.

Last week, Consumer Reports’ annual auto reliability survey found not one US car company listed in the top 10. Like most Americans, I see Consumer Reports as the most trusted resource in choosing products to buy, topped only by brand loyalty and recommendations from friends and family. So, why did American automakers –and, in particular, Ford, ranked #20, while #10 last year– fall so much in the most recent survey?

I figured that I could find the answer in social media. Using our social analytics solution, I found the most commonly used words across social media related to Ford and the Consumer Reports survey. The results showed the words “Consumer Reports,” “Ford Focus,” “Profit Falls to 1.6 Billion” and “Reliability Survey” as the most frequently appearing.

As evidenced by the above words, social media users are discussing Ford’s place in the Consumer Reports survey in detail, focusing on the automaker’s third quarter net income dropping to $1.6 billion, as well as the decreased sales for what was their answer to the Toyota Camry and Honda Accord: the Ford Focus.

However, what’s interesting is that, even though the above points are being highlighted, the sentiment in social media associated with the same terms showed that there is not as high of a degree of negative emotion expressed. Why is that?

With neutral comments accounting for 64.5% of what is being discussed in social media, it seems that people are flocking to Twitter, Facebook and other sites mainly to report the news. The neutral sentiment largely outweighs the individual tweets and comments from loyalists.

For those who do go into detail about their negative or positive opinions, they talk about the touch-screen and transmission glitches hurting Ford; or reference the old “Fixed Or Repaired Daily” acronym for Ford; or highlight Ford discontinuing the Crown Victoria and not having a V8-powered sedan for sale for the first time since 1932; or even note the irony of Ford’s worst year coinciding with Pixar’s worst received film yet portraying American cars racing against overseas competitors. (Cars2 was largely a bust and the whole theme of the movie was a James Bond twist that centered around bad guys, clean gas and global car races.)

Ford has publicly responded to the survey results, stating that consumer feedback is very important to them. The solution for Ford lies in text analytics and social media monitoring. Using these applications to look at survey, repair, dealer and email data, combined with an understanding of the conversation trends online they can get to the bottom of their perception and product issues enabling them to take their own advice from a 1980s ad campaign, telling viewers that “Quality is Job 1.”

Photo credit: Kees Bunk via Flickr

Unless you’ve been hiding in a hole somewhere, you know what “Occupy Wallstreet, Occupy Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Oakland, Atlanta, Phoenix, Berlin, Tokyo, Madrid, London, etc., etc.” is. If you don’t – it is a protest against social and economic inequality, corporate greed, and the influence of corporate money and lobbyists on government, among other concerns taking place all over the world. It’s easy to describe, but after listening to both talk radio and reading the many bloggers on the topic, the goal is less clear.

The press, general media and tweeters all over the world have reported on the events that are taking place at these protests. Sometimes they consist of peaceful speeches (since many of the locations of these protests do not allow amplification, speakers typically say about 8 words, which are then repeated by the crowd to use people to amplify the speech, this goes on for each speaker and has become somewhat of a cultural norm at these gatherings.) Other times the protests become more intense particularly when curfews are passed or if fringe members of the protesters do something to make police nervous.

Some of the protesters have complained that they aren’t getting enough attention or support from the media.  With such an elongated event (so far it’s been 6 weeks+ in some locations) the media has reported on it in ebbs and flows….lately the news has picked up (possibly due to recent, move violet outbreaks @OccupyOakland).

Out of the over 180,000 conversations in social and traditional media in the last 7 days, much of it has been news and republishing of news (retweets, bloggers republishing a story) – so the sentiment has been largely neutral. But, the positive and the negative are pretty extreme – posts with lots of emotion and true sentiment about the “rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer.”

Example posts include:

• Neutral: “Another day at #occupywallstreet – today we strike!”
• Positive: “#OccupyWallstreet is free love, someone pass around the #std test!”
• Negative: “Amerika, if you didn’t waste trillons on bogus wars you wouldn’t be so broke #occupywallstreet”

Outside of the shows of support and the criticisms of how governments all over the world have handled the economic crises and the banking industry, if you look more closely at conversations they cover a wide-range of complaints and issues- including protesting taxes, bank bail-outs, unemployment rates, student loans, education costs, healthcare costs, minimum wage and more.  Sometimes the protests veer into blame – government and the financial industry are the two biggest targets. But with such broad goals –  are they working?

BofA announced today it’s scrapping the $5/month debit card fee previously announced. This follows on last week’s announcements from JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo that they decided to cancel test programs. SunTrust Banks and Regions Financial Corp said on Monday that they would end monthly charges and reimburse customers.  But there is a still a long way to go….

How do you feel about the “Occupy” movement?

Photo Credit by eeepee

Attensity is excited to be sponsoring two upcoming events here in our back yard in Silicon Valley. Both events are happening  the same week, so if you’re in the area please stop by and say hello, meet the Attensity team, and see the latest developments and future directions in today’s hottest technology trends including Social CRM, customer analytics and engagement, text analytics and sentiment analysis. And don’t forget to take advantage of the Attensity discounts when you register. We look forward to seeing you there!

Sentiment Analysis Symposium
November 9, San Francisco, CA
Join Attensity at the Sentiment Analysis Symposium and learn from experts and peers how to hear the Voice of the Customer attitudes and emotions expressed in social, online, and enterprise sources, and turn customer voices into business advantage. The event will feature speakers from VoC innovators including Zynga, HP, Amazon, Whirlpool, TripAdvisor, and the Red Cross talking about the role sentiment analysis plays in customer experience, marketing, market research, quality and other applications.
Register with code ATTENSITY and save $200!
Click here for more information and to register.

Text Analytics Summit West
November 10-11, San Jose, CA
Attensity is excited to help bring North America’s premier Text Analytics event to the West Coast as platinum sponsor. Join Catherine van Zuylen, Attensity’s VP of Products, for the event’s keynote address “The Future of Text Analytics,” and hear Cisco’s Director of Customer and Business Intelligence, Laura Brown, tell how business users at Cisco are using text analytics to derive highly accurate, detailed insights from unstructured customer conversations. Attensity’s CTO, Ian Hersey, will also be on hand for a Technology Insider’s panel.
Register with discount code ATTENSITY1 and save $250!
Click here for more information and to register.