Attensity’s own Catherine van Zuylen, VP of Products, has been invited to give the keynote address at the upcoming Text Analytics Summit West on November 10 in San Jose, CA.

Text Analytics News recently interviewed Catherine, along with two other industry professionals at companies that are pioneering text analytics and big data to ask them some questions about their personal experiences in the analytics industry and the future outlook of the text analytics market.  The three professionals include:

• Catherine Van Zuylen – Vice President of Products, Attensity
• Tom H. C. Anderson – President, Anderson Analytics
• Daniel Graham – General Manager Enterprise Systems, Teradata

Q. When and how did you first get into text analytics, and what was it that attracted you to this technology in the first place?

Anderson: From 2001 through 2005 I worked on Starwood Hotels Customer Satisfaction Program, and during that time we had over a million VOC Surveys coming in per year. It was very different from other types of research I had conducted in the past, and while we were using very advanced analysis on quantitative data points I realized that the text comments could add so much more explanatory power to the analysis.

In graduate school my main area of interest was in gaining consumer insights through data mining, and though text mining (NLP) was still relatively new at least in terms of adoption, I started exploring the various software already on the market and found we could more easily answer and solve various business questions by leveraging the unstructured data available to us. So in 2005 I started Anderson Analytics and during the past six years we’ve leveraged these new techniques in a number of ways I hadn’t even thought of at the time.

The rise of social media during this time certainly helped propel this field and offer even greater opportunities. Expanding beyond survey research to working with data from Bulletin boards, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter has certainly kept it exciting.

Graham: Around 2000, I was at IBM working with Watson Labs on text analysis projects. At the time, we were working with a stock brokerage in Manhattan with their call center. Consumers would call in and tell the contact center person dozens of personal things, some of which could be used to improve service and also sell more to the consumer. I learned a great deal about ontologies, text processing, and text analytics. At about the same time, a few Professional Services people were able to help Ford Motor use a data warehouse to solve the Firestone Tire blow out problem affecting their SUVs and trucks. There was lot of text processing and data warehouse analytics needed for that.

Being in analytics for most of my career, the use of text analysis was fascinating. There was huge potential in many applications. I think the complexity of the text problems were also attractive – these were tough computer science problems which just makes it all the more fun when you solve them. I have always been fascinated with why the computer can’t read. This is a start.

Zuylen: I’ve been involved in the text analytics space for nearly a decade. I was attracted to the text analytics space because it provides the ability to truly organize the world’s textual information – transforming research papers, tweets, emails, and billions of other documents into actionable insights that have the power to transform human knowledge and drive real global understanding and innovation.

Read the rest of the interview here.

If there’s one thing I love more than triathlons, a fine red wine, or the Aloha State, it’s strategy. Technology strategy, account strategy, nutrition strategy (in long Ironman events) and, most of all, business strategy. Sometimes when companies break the rules, they are wildly successful because they saw something fundamentally different about how their situation was different than that of a classic MBA case study. Other times, however, even when they are run by very smart, very successful people, they seem to forget the basics. This seems to be the case with Netflix.

Before I go further, I have a couple of confessions about Netflix. First, I’ve been a customer off and on for a while. Years ago for their DVD-by-mail service, which I abandoned because I found myself not having watched the same obscure DVD for months on end. Apparently, I don’t manage my queues very well. Or, more probably, I have an abundance of content choices, between premium movie channels, TiVo, DVDs I’ve bought but haven’t yet watched, magazines, newspapers (yes, I actually still read those, though mostly on iPad apps these days), etc. Too much content; too little time. It was the integration of physical DVDs and streaming movies that brought me back to Netflix – well, that’s not exactly true. It was the iPad that brought me back to Netflix. Attensity’s analysis of the iPad’s launch showed that one of the most compelling apps as reported by millions of users was Netflix, so I decided to give it a try. Millions can’t be wrong, right?

The other confession I have about Netflix is that I’m slightly miffed at them. They poached a good friend and very technically competent employee from me, and CEO Reed Hastings even wanted to do a reference call with me, almost as if to say “it’s a fait accompli – I get what I want. You can’t stop me, so you might as well talk to me.” I hadn’t paid much attention to Netflix as a company up until that point, but the over-the-top offer they made in order to get this guy certainly raised my eyebrows. So I put them on my watch list.

Then came the price increase in mid July. What struck me most of all was that the entire rollout of it – from how it was communicated (as a business strategy) to who the target audience of that communication was (the investment community) – was leaving out the most important audience: the customer.

And as much as I love strategy and strategic moves with sound rationale behind them, I have to say that as a customer I was a little bit pissed. Actually, a lot pissed. And I watched other friends and connections of mine on social media discussing the very same issue, and they were pissed. Clearly, a nerve had been struck.

Having access to a comprehensive social media platform, I decided to try to quantify the extent of the customer backlash. What became clear was that not only were many (i.e., millions of) people talking about the issue, they were becoming increasingly dissatisfied with Netflix’ reaction to the negative feedback. A couple of examples of cogent articulation of the general reaction came from slashdot and here.

For me personally, this comes down to a matter of principle, not the actual amount of the price increase. It’s fairly simple: Netflix’ attitude is we are changing our strategy, you will start paying 50% more with no improvement in the product offering, and if you decide to leave, it doesn’t matter, because we have already factored in some attrition that will be more than compensated for by our new entry into Latin America. In other words, if you don’t like it, you can lump it. Your business doesn’t matter that much to us.

That, for me, was the death knell. You can make mistakes, have technical glitches, whatever (even we have been known to have a few ), but the key when you make mistakes is that you make things right with customers. Netflix seems to be doing the opposite – telling them they don’t have a right to feel the way they do, they don’t “grok” the strategy, etc. That may go over well in boardrooms, but it doesn’t sit well with the individual who has the choice of where to spend his or her money.

To add insult to injury, for some at least, Hastings posted this blog entry as a sort of apology-cum-defense. If nothing else, examination of the comments, both in their volume and in what they actually say, shows the level of engagement people have with this whole topic. At my last count, there were over 22,000 comments, and negative were outweighing positive by about 10 to 1. What’s more telling from drilling down into the actual verbatims was that many people had not yet canceled their service but intended to once they were approaching the end of their billing cycle (Netflix offers no pro-rata refund for an unused portion of a month); a little extra “f- you” to the company. That means that the bleeding isn’t over.

The vitriol stands in stark contrast to cases where companies have made big errors but rectified them immediately: the Apple iPhone 4 antenna issue, for example, but, closer to home, the ill-conceived Ironman Access program, which inspired such rancor that a lengthy parody video was created on Xtranormal and, more tellingly, prompted the World Triathlon Corporation to rescind the program 24 hours after having announced it. That’s listening to your customers.

In that vein, therefore, I decided to have a little fun and try my hand at Xtranormal’s product, taking Hastings’ blog entry verbatim (minus one section I excised because the video was already too long) and interspersing a compendium of real customer reaction based on the many comments I pulled. Plus a bit of my own outrage. And you don’t even have to pay for streaming to watch it.

Netflix CEO offers customers “an explanation”

One lesson that’s clear from analyzing both the Netflix “launch” of this change and the customer response is that although a strategy shift may seem the most rational and obvious thing in the world to the folks in the executive offices, customers don’t care about your company’s strategy. They care about the product you’re offering them, and if that product hits the mark in a way that no other offering does, they become more than customers – they become fans. That’s what Apple has managed to achieve; an analysis of not only the substance of the customer backlash but also the tone suggests that Netflix has lost its customers as fans.

That could be a very expensive strategy lesson indeed.

As CMOs try to figure out how social media fits into the marketing mix, there has been a lot of discussion in the marketing community about what role social media plays in outbound marketing, but many (although not all) have ignored the amazing value that social media and specifically Facebook can play when it comes to inbound feedback.  When I say not all have ignored it  – there have been some really interesting stories about brands who have leveraged Facebook and blogs to really engage customers and get their thoughts on everything from marketing campaigns to products and services.  Most of the feedback is typically related to a campaign of sorts – see this great list of the 20 “most innovative” Facebook campaigns, but there are some brands who have and who plan to leverage the relationships they are building on Facebook, the time their consumers spend on Facebook and the great opportunity Facebook provides to get feedback from customers to gather feedback to make their businesses better!

Now I don’t believe that Facebook, as a customer feedback tool, will replace surveys (or even the now less used Focus Groups or Panels), but it will be a nice addition to the feedback arsenal that provides an opportunity for:

1) More real-time feedback…marketers can just get on, ask a question or  join a conversation. New ideas can be thrown out there, impromptu panels formed.

2) Access to an involved customer segment. Those who “like” your brand and are engaged on Facebook tend to be a more active customer (or at least one that is really into social media!)

3) Testing ideas, new marketing messages/campaigns, new products or services, etc. Marketers can get fast feedback before pursuing something that is untested.

In order to enable companies to understand this feedback, to track the discussions over time, to gather Facebook survey responses and to leverage this new consumer medium for getting feedback from customers that is available in a way that is accessible and actionable by the business, Attensity announced  today an extension to our Facebook analytics offering.  The offering includes out of the box access to Facebook content including posts, conversation threads, survey responses and more.  Business users, through a wizard, can choose a specific Facebook interaction and easily set-up analytics for a specific survey, set of posts and threads.  It’s as easy as clicking the “like” button!  Below is an example of some Facebook reports that also come out of the box. They include everything from sentiment analysis to detailed analytics around issues, response categories, compliments and complaints, how many “likes” resulted from the interaction and more.

Is your brand using Facebook to gather feedback from your customers?

Photo credit: by pshab

My alarm went off at 6:00 a.m., like it did every morning before work. I was 7 months pregnant  with our first son and about to hit the snooze button when the NPR reporter started talking about an airplane that flew into one of the twin towers. Was it off-course?  Was this an accident? My husband was on a business trip back east, so I picked-up the phone and called my Mom in Florida. Is it true? Did an airplane hit the twin towers?  Silence on the other side of the phone, followed by a deep breath, “yes, it’s true.”  And, “Oh my Gosh, another one” – she watched it live – the second plane.  I ran downstairs to turn on the TV and was frozen watching for what seemed like minutes, but two hours later, as the morning unfolded, the airplane in Penna, the airplane at the Pentagon.  The pictures of the burning towers (towers I could see for years when I lived in NYC if I stretched myself out of the window and looked south between the buildings.) The towers falling down, I was crying uncontrollably, so was everyone else. Newscasters, people I spoke to, the people in the office, once I actually made it into the office.

For days all we could talk about was where we were and what we were doing when “it” happened. I finally got in touch with my friends in NYC, same thing, stories about which rooftop they went up to, to watch, stories of friends who were there, people they knew who didn’t make it out.  The firemen, the heros who ran back up to help others, the EMTs, the police.  A decade later the pain for all of us in the United States is still raw. For the last month the tribute shows, the documentaries about the new museum, interviews with the families and colleagues of the innocent fallen ones, makes it even more raw. A decade and two wars later, we mourn for lost soldiers, their families and soldiers who are dealing with life after they come back from war and their families.  A decade of pain, a decade of trying to get who did this – who funded it, who planned and carried it out, who still destroys with subsequent terror.  The world changed that day.  No more whisking through the airport 20 minutes before a flight. Now wondering,  on any public transportation, train, airplane, could it happen here next? And we remember.  The discussions have changed from just the phone to Facebook, Twitter and other online sites and commemorative forums.  The same conversations – Where were you?

For the decade anniversary, in addition to lots of conversation and news stories and documentaries about 9/11, ten years later, the world is on high alert.  New threats, intelligence buzz and the fact that is is ten years later, ups the fear that it could happen again and the triumph of doing it on such a special anniversary for the evil doers is a reality.  The social web is not only abuzz about 9/11, but the fear of terror is seemingly stronger than ever.  The fear and paranoia level seems to have risen (see the word cloud below) and even with the recent earthquake many east coasters first thought was that the earth shaking was an act of terror. If you saw the video of the white house during the earthquake you saw security snipers running around on the roof trying to figure out if the building was shaking from an explosion. The concern for those who survived and were at ground zero is also still on the minds of so many.

And the conversation volume as we get closer to this anniversary is also rising.

Many of the conversations focused on reaching out to commemorate the day, the lost lives, our soldiers who have sacrificed so much.  The new social world has added a forum for us to never forget, to commemorate, to express our fears and our hope and to thank our brave brothers and sisters who fight for our freedom every day.

Photo Credit: Globovisión Web