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Accuracy Proves Quality Analytics

Accuracy is key for analytics, because it validates information performed by a computer while the human user was away doing other business. The only way to measure accuracy is to compare human analysis to computer analysis. The Attensity Blog focuses on “How Accuracy In Analytics Matters For Businesses.” The article explains accuracy is measured to how well a computer can mimic a human brain:

“Computers only do what we tell them to do.  They have (almost) infinite computational power, and can apply any set of rules to any computational variables.  This means that if we tell computers that a specific word or combination of words means something positive, then the computer cannot make it mean something negative.  In other words, we are not really rating the computer’s ability to determine a sentiment we are rating whether humans did a good job, or not, in biasing the computer to pick that sentiment.  This means we can accurately predict an outcome selected by the computer before the first variable is computed against the first rule.”

In other words, accuracy is human bias and for better analytics it should be reduced. To reduce bias, analytics’’ core elements must be examined: what is analyzed and what it is compared to. The article outlines the steps taken to help reduce bias and how it can improve a company’s standing, finance, etc. It look like that accuracy means adding the extra ingredient of love that grandma puts in her cookies, i.e. you have to care about it.

Whitney Grace, January 21, 2013

Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search

Google Autocomplete: Is Smart Help a Hindrance?

You may have heard of the deep extraction company Attensity. There is another company in a similar business with the name inTTENSITY. Not the playful misspelling of the common word “intensity.” What happens when a person looking for the company inTTENSITY get when he or she runs a query on Google. Look at what Google’s autocomplete suggestions recommend when I type intten:

The company’s spelling appears along with the less helpful “interstate ten”, “internet explorer ten”, and “internet icon top ten.” If I enter “inten”, I don’t get the company name. No surprise.

Is Google’s autocomplete a help or hindrance? The answer, in my opinion, is it depends on the users and what he or she is seeking.

I just read “Germany’s Former First Lady Sues Google For Defamation Over Autocomplete Suggestions.” According to the write up:

When you search for “Bettina Wulff” on Google, the search engine will happily autocomplete this search with terms like “escort” and “prostitute.” That’s obviously not something you would like to be associated with your name, so the wife of former German president Christian Wulff has now, according to Germany’s Süddeutschen Zeitung, decided to sue Google for defamation. The reason why these terms appear in Google’s autocomplete is that there have been persistent rumors that Wulff worked for an escort service before she met her husband. Wulff categorically denies that this is true.

The article explains that autocomplete has been the target of criticism before. The concluding statement struck me as interesting:

In Japan, a man recently filed a suit against Google after the autocomplete feature started linking his names with a number of crimes he says he wasn’t involved in. A court in Japan then ordered Google to delete these terms from autocomplete. Google also lost a similar suit in Italy in 2011.

I have commented about the interesting situations predictive algorithms can create. I assume that Google’s numerical recipes chug along like a digital and intent-free robot.

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Social Media Analytics Finds 98.6 Percent Positive Sentiment Towards Rock of Ages

Have you ever wondered if it was possible to accurately predict a successful motion picture?

If so, wouldn’t the owner of this technology invest in winning films? MarketWatch recently discussed this very topic in the article “Social Media Sentiment Strongly Positive Toward ‘Rock of Ages’ Despite Film’s Disappointing Box Office.”

According to the article, Attensity, a social analytics and engagement provider, has released a report analyzing public reaction in social media to the movie, Rock of Ages by using the company’s social analytics application Attensity Analyze.

After looking at sites like Twitter, Facebook, news sites, forums, videos and other social sources before and after the release, the report found:

“Attensity’s data reveals that the already positive sentiment toward Rock of Ages, in fact, grew over 10 percent after the film’s premiere. Positive sentiment for Tom Cruise in the movie also increased, moving from 47.87 percent to 52 percent. On the other hand, critics of Tom Cruise jumped on the opportunity to post their negative comments about the actor and his participation in Rock of Ages, adding to the small amount of negative sentiment and arguably playing a role in the film’s lackluster opening weekend numbers.”

While researchers discovered an overwhelming 96.8 percent positive sentiment toward Rock of Ages, can this technology be applied to all movies and actually predict a film’s success? or does it merely pick up on the excitement surrounding it?

Jasmine Ashton, June 27, 2012

Sponsored by PolySpot

Social Analytics Case Studies Available: Sentiment Towards Major Airlines

Whether or not companies choose to look at customers’ experiences told through channels such as Facebook and Twitter, customers are updating their statuses and tweeting about their experiences. Airlines are one such industry in which people frequently rant and rave about.

The article “Friday’s Features: Using Attensity Analyze 6.0 To Compare Customer Sentiment for @United @ Southwestair @Virginamerica” discusses a comparative analysis of data on these three airlines. The figures shown in the article illustrate share of voice, sentiment by airline, and detailed positive or negative sentiment.

As for results, Virgin America’s positive sentiment hovers above 75% positive while Southwest Airlines held at slightly over 70% positive. United’s sentiment shows the opposite with around 26% positive sentiment and 74% negative sentiment.

The article referenced above concludes that social media is influential for these airlines:

“Hoping that folks will ignore you if you ignore social media is a sure way to drive negative sentiment for your customer base. While United Airlines may feel insulated by its corporate contracts, expect many individuals to tell their procurement organizations to switch carriers this year as the negative sentiment for United grows. In fact, companies such as United Airlines better wake up to the reality of social media or face an eroding customer base.”

These social analytics case studies are particularly useful in showing how transparent customer relations have become. Snag this information while it is out there.

Megan Feil, June 12, 2012

Sponsored by PolySpot

InQuira Antecedents: Answerfriend and Electric Knowledge

I have had to look up the antecedents for InQuira again. I wanted to create this post to make it easy to reference these two firms which were combined to create InQuira. InQuira was acquired by Oracle Corp. in that company’s push to address its long-standing search and content processing issues. I have in my Overflight system the 2006 InQuira marketing collateral which, I noticed, provides a crib sheet for the many enterprise search vendors piling into the customer support segment. What’s interesting is that customer support is one of the sectors where open source search is getting some attention.

The antecedents of InQuira were:

• Answerfriend. The company had software which could understand text. In 2000, the company landed Accenture as a customer. Answerfriend pivoted on its natural language processing technology. Allegedly Answerfriend could handle both structured an unstructured data. Sound familiar in 2012?
• Electric Knowledge Inc. This also was an NLP shop. The technology was based on computational linguistic technology. This company had licensed its technology to Bank of America, an outfit which has had a long history of trying to find a search system which meets its requirements.

InQuira was created in 2002. The notion of hooking together two separate vendors to do the 1+1=3 thing has been used more recently by Lexalytics and Attensity.

At one time, InQuira was the answer system used by Yahoo’s customer support service. I encountered this when I tried to cancel a Yahoo service. The InQuira service was not too helpful to me. I just killed the credit card and solved the problem.

The marketing pitch of InQuira is as fresh today as it was in 2002. How much progress has there been in search and content processing in the last decade? Could the marketing collateral for a 2002 Oldsmobile be used without any changes? Probably not. Search has a limited supply of jargon, and it gets recycled endlessly in my opinion.

Stephen E Arnold, May 26, 2012

Sponsored by Polyspot

Forrester Lets the Social Cat Out of The Bag

Enterprise Communications recently reported on social media monitoring in the article “Forrester’s Evaluation on Social Media Monitoring.”

According to the article, the Forrester report evaluated nine current vendors that it split into the groups: current offering, strategy, and marketing presence. The research revealed some potential changes and considerations businesses should take into account when implementing a social media monitoring strategy.

the results revealed:

“Radian6 and Visible Technologies were, according to Forrester and should be used as a guide only, leading the market principally based on two key aspects: dashboards that are broad in the functionality, and road maps that are innovative in design. Forrester’s evaluation also rated Attensity, NM Incite, Converseon, SDL, Networked Insights and Synthesio.”

Unfortunately these “listening tools” only gather data. The companies are then forced to decide what to do with that data. I wonder if the coverage is free or pay to play? Real consulting firms and real analysts do everything for intellectual rewards.

Jasmine Ashton, May 18, 2012

Sponsored by PolySpot

Search Vendors and Web Traffic

I was fiddling around with Compete.com, a Web analytics outfit. One of the company’s services is to provide usage statistics for urls. I have no idea if these data are in line with the vendors’ Web logs, but one can look at a number of sites’ traffic and do some rough comparisons. You can try the service at www.compete.com. The tables below present some of the data I examined. Vendors, don’t write to tell me Compete data are incorrect. We are looking at data generated by a method. I am not selecting data to make your Web site magnetism weak.

Here is this sample’s alleged traffic from most traffic to least traffic:

Several observations:

1. There is little correlation between having a Web site and traffic. If you build it, no one may come. Search engine optimization experts are not able to deliver the chunky granola bar stuffed with sales leads I surmise.
2. Traffic, even for the leaders Exalead (Dassault Systèmes) and Autonomy (Hewlett Packard) is modest when compared to the traffic to the main Dassault and the HP main Web sites. Dassault’s traffic is reported as 56,164 and HP’s, 13,856,775. My thought is that search and content processing is not the home run some folks assume it will be. I don’t think effective search is a commodity. I think search is not hot as other fields; e.g., analytics.
3. The different marketing methods in use work in some cases and in others not at all. A good example are those companies with Web site traffic so low that Compete.com reports zero traffic. The little known Exorbyte generates an alleged 11,486 while the marketing calisthenics of Webinar centric marketing (BA Insight and Concept Searching) and the open source approach (SearchBlox) yield little traffic. What happens when one marketing method doesn’t perform? Most vendors just try something else. When something works,  vendors just keep doing it until it no longer works. Rinse, repeat.

More work needs to be done to figure out what generates traffic to a group of companies which appear to have modest traction even with the backing of major companies (e.g., Endeca is owned by Oracle). Some of these companies have expensive public relations programs in place. I don’t know how much firms such as MarkLogic and Recommind spend on the flow of news releases, special events, and trade publication by lined articles, but the traffic seems to be an issue.

My thought is that most of the vendors in the search and content processing space face what I would characterize as a “crisis” in marketing. None of the activities produce blockbuster traffic. Obviously, if a Web site has a single unique visitor and that visitor places a $20 million order, the Web site worked. My hunch is that some of these companies are going to kick into what I call “desperation marketing” mode. I see this when I get mindless faux “news” announcements from PR firms stuffed with failed middle school teachers, unemployed socialogy graduate students, and “real” journalists whose magazine or newspaper nuked itself.

“Desperation marketing” is the outcome of watching costs for each sales contact go up without a comparable increase in the close rate. If sales come only when there is cost cutting to win the job, then the financial situation becomes increasingly charged. Desperation marketing leads to rich search engine optimization consultants and white paper work for the “pay to play” consultants. (Yes, this is the coloring agent for the azure chip consulting herd.) Have you heard of webinar fatigue? I have it. How many SharePoint webinars do I need to sit in on to know that SharePoint is a complex and often irritable beastie? Webinar fatigue is what causes a potential attendee to sign up, listen for five minutes, and then move on to checking a Facebook page. Some companies would do better to put the thing on video and go with a YouTube channel with a “register to win a bagel” inducement on a special landing page.

Search and content processing vendors need more than hit-and-miss marketing activities. If I were responsible for a search and content processing company, I would be looking for different ways to generate visibility and sales leads.

A Web site alone won’t do the job. Traditional PR seems to work in some cases and does not work in others. The variable, of course, is the talent of the PR professional and the value proposition the company sets forth. Get the PR wrong or the message wrong, and PR becomes a hit and miss investment. SEO appeared to me to be part of each of these companies’ Web presence. I also have a tally of which of these companies make use of blogs and social media like Twitter, which I may summarize in another blog post. But the data suggest to me that social media is no panacea either. Traditional marketing and PR are expensive, unreliable, and an okay reaction to competitors’ actions.

Is there another path? We think there are some new methods. One interesting one is the Augmentext service. It is worth a quick look.

In the meantime, if you are trying to close deals using a Web site and some old fashioned methods, you may find yourself under increasing pressure. Replacing company presidents, hiring a Mad Ave agency, or signing on with a slick self appointed expert—these are standard methods. The issue becomes making them work in a tough economic and competitive environment.

Stephen E Arnold, April 4, 2012

Sponsored by Pandia.com

Exogenous Complexity 4: SEO and Big Data

Introduction

In the interview with Dr. Linda McIsaac, founder of Xyte, Inc., I learned that new analytic methods reveal high-value insights about human behavior. You can read the full interview in my Search Wizards Speak series at this link. The method involves an approach called Xyting and sophisticated analytic methods.

One example of the type of data which emerge from the Xyte method are these insights about Facebook users:

• Consumers who are most in tune with the written word are more likely to use Facebook. These consumers are the most frequent Internet users and use Facebook primarily to communicate with friends and connect with family.
• They like to keep their information up-to-date, meet new people, share photos, follow celebrities, share concerns, and solve people problems.
• They like to learn about and share experiences about new products. Advertisers should key in on this important segment because they are early adopters. They lead trends and influence others.
• The population segment that most frequents Facebook has a number of characteristics; for example, showing great compassion for others, wanting to be emotionally connected with others, having a natural intuition about people and how to relate to them, adapting well to change, embracing technology such as the Internet, and enjoying gossip and messages delivered in story form and liking to read and write.
• Facebook constituents are emotional, idealistic and romantic, yet can rationalize through situations. Many do not need concrete examples in order to comprehend new ideas.

I am not into social networks. Sure, some of our for-free content is available via social media channels, but where I live in rural Kentucky yelling down the hollow works quite well.

I read “How The Era Of ‘Big-Data’ Is Changing The Practice Of Online Marketing” and came away confused. You should work through the text, graphs, charts, and lingo yourself. I got a headache because most of the data struck me as slightly off center from what an outfit like Xyte has developed. More about this difference in a moment.

The thrust of the argument is that “big data” is now available to those who would generate traffic to client Web sites. Big data is described as “a torrent of digital data.” The author continues:

large sets of data that, when mined, could reveal insight about online marketing efforts. This includes data such as search rankings, site visits, SERPs and click-data.  In the SEO realm alone at Conductor, for example, we collect tens of terabytes of search data for enterprise search marketers every month.

Like most SEO baloney, there are touchstones and jargon aplenty. For example, SERP, click data, enterprise search, and others. The intent is to suggest that one can pay a company to analyze big data and generate insights. The insights can be used to produce traffic to a Web page, make sales, or produce leads which can become sales. In a lousy business environment, such promises appeal to some people. Like most search engine optimization pitches, the desperate marketer may embrace the latest and greatest pitch. Little wonder there are growing numbers of unemployed professionals who failed to deliver the sales their employer wanted. The notion of desperation marketing fosters a services business who can assert to deliver sales and presumably job security for those who hire the SEO “experts.” I am okay with this type of business, and I am indifferent to the hollowness of the claims.

What interests me is this statement:

From our vantage point at Conductor, the move to the era of big data has been catalyzed by several distinct occurrences:

• Move to Thousands of Keywords: The old days of SEO involved tracking your top fifty keywords. Today, enterprise marketers are tracking up to thousands of keywords as the online landscape becomes increasingly competitive, marketers advance down the maturity spectrum and they work to continuously expand their zone of coverage in search.

• Growing Digital Assets: A recent Conductor study showed universal search results are now present in 8 out of 10 high-volume searches. The prevalence of digital media assets (e.g. images, video, maps, shopping, PPC) in the SERPs require marketers to get innovative about their search strategy.

• Multiple Search Engines: Early days of SEO involved periodically tracking your rank on Google.  Today, marketers want to expand not just to Yahoo and Bing, but also to the dozens of search engines around the world as enterprise marketers expand their view to a global search presence.

All the above factors combined mean there are significant opportunities for an  increase in both the breadth and volume of data available to search professionals.

Effective communication, in my experience, is not measured in “thousands of key words”. The notion of expanding the “zone of coverage” means that meaning is diffused. Of course, the intent of the key words is not getting a point across. The goal is to get traffic, make sales. This is the 2112 equivalent of the old America Online carpet bombing of CD ROMs decades ago. Good business for CD ROM manufacturers, I might add. Erosion of meaning opens the door to some exogenous complexity excitement I assert.

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Politicians Try to Surf on Social Media

Is this a new type of polling or is it social trolling? Attensity’s blog reports, “Politico Uses Attensity to Analyze SOPA Sentiment.” Attensity took on Politico’s challenge to mine social media for attitudes on the Stop Online Piracy Act. It turns out that people who spend a lot of time online skew heavily against the law. Go figure.

Author James Purchase writes:

If I had to directly summarize this analysis, I would say that the SOPA-opposition is significantly more organized and vocal in using Social Media to make their point. Whether or not the social media outcry affects the outcome of the legislation remains to be seen.

Perhaps, though I hope the uproar against the law has reached the ears of even the most tech-adverse legislators. They have interns, right? Some are awkward too. Wipe out!

Cynthia Murrell, February 12, 2012

Sponsored by Pandia.com

Social Media Saves Coca Cola!

Big new. From the shoot yourself in the foot department comes another reminder of “real” marketing.

Even though I am one of those unfortunate Diet Coke addicts, the recent inverted color Coca-Cola can problem was not lost on me. The white can was a collaborative project with the World Wildlife Fund to raise awareness and donations for the polar bear. The white can was taken off the market in just five weeks for various reasons: customers confused it with Diet Coke, asserted it tasted different, or were utterly offended at the change of the iconic red can.

Guess who saved the day? A search and content processing vendor, that’s who. After customers reacted on social media, Attensity analyzed the feedback. We learn more in the article, “Social Analysis: Coca-Cola’s White Can Turnaround”:

On one hand, the data clearly indicates that Coke’s white can was well liked by most, indicating clever marketing by Coke to create Buzz around an extremely familiar product. On the other hand, there was just enough real negative sentiment towards the white can to justify a swift reaction to avoid the issue escalating any further, especially in light of the social media feedback on announcements from companies like Bank of America and Netflix.

Never mind that the overall purpose of the campaign was lost in the hoopla surrounding the can color, we wonder about the marketing intelligence behind this move. Our question: Why wasn’t appropriate research done prior to the misstep? A Coca Cola tradition, perhaps?

Search vendors rank right up there with Coca Cola. Who can forget the Google and the Muppets? Google Plus to the rescue?

Andrea Hayden, February 5, 2012

Sponsored by Pandia.com

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  Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.

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