First let’s look at the definition of the Sentiment Analysis [Wikipedia]:

“Sentiment analysis or opinion mining refers to a broad (definitionally challenged) area of natural language processing, computational linguistics and text mining. Generally speaking, it aims to determine the attitude of a speaker or a writer with respect to some topic. The attitude may be their judgment or evaluation (see appraisal theory), their affective state (that is to say, the emotional state of the author when writing) or the intended emotional communication (that is to say, the emotional effect the author wishes to have on the reader).”

And why you should care?

Social Media and Social Networking have fueled the online space. Ratings, reviews, comments, etc – are everywhere. From NYT article http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/24/technology/internet/24emotion.html :

“This is more than just an interesting programming exercise. For many businesses, online opinion has turned into a kind of virtual currency that can make or break a product in the marketplace.”

We tell our clients – you have to listen to what people are saying about your brand, products, services… and more importantly you should react, respond. Nicely said than done. Simple Twitter search on iPhone will give you tons of results. Is it possible for a brand to manually look at the every single mention and respond?? Of course not! Automation is the strategy… But – smart automation. As a consumer I do not want to get some irrelevant auto-response from a brand.

Solution – analysis of the unstructured texts. Not just on a set of keywords, but also on emotions. Not an easy task to do, but there are visionary companies who are working on tools/products that can help brands to deal with all these amounts of unstructured content and help them to make sense of the emotions hidden behind customer’s feedback.

We were able to gather an amazing panel of experts who will take us on a journey inside the fascinating space of sentiment analysis.

Save the date! You do not want to miss these discussions!

How Sentiment Analysis can Make Sense of Social Media (or Can it?)
Date: March 2, 2010

Location: Mountain View, CA

Time: 6:30 pm

Overview:

Ever since we realized that we needed more than mere transactional CRM data to get to know our customers and deliver on the mythical 360-degree view of them, we focused on two areas: what customers want (psychographics) and what customers feel (emotions and sentiments).
We spent the past 7-8 years figuring out direct and indirect feedback methods to try to understand what customers want and need using Enterprise Feedback Management and Surveys. We even went as far as to adopt and implement social media to capture the un-structured feedback that was latent in those interactions.
What we discovered along the way was that Social Media and unstructured feedback can be used to analyze sentiments and feelings, as customers are less controlled of their emotions when interacting in a social environment. We tried to understand the true sentiments behind the feedback and how we can use it for achieve our goals.
Alas, have we figured out how to use it and understand it? Can we really understand and use customers sentiments as metrics? What happens when we analyze for sentiments and not data? These are some of the questions we will aim to answer in this panel including:
· What is sentiment analysis?

· Does it work?

· What are the known problems?

· What are the know results?

· Should I implement it?

· What should I expect after implementation?

· What is the maintenance like?

· Is sentiment analysis for real?

· What are vendors doing about it?

Panelists:

Franco Salvetti holds a position as Senior SDE Manager of the Reference Vertical Answer team at Microsoft Bing Search (previously Natural Language Scientist at Powerset, Inc. now acquired by Microsoft) with responsibility on the scientific aspects related to Web Search Technologies (e.g., Factz and Instant Answers), and Human-Computer Interaction. Previously as a research scientist at Umbria Inc. (acquaried by J.D. Power) he worked on projects involving Information Extraction, Sentiment Analysis, Text Analysis and Graph Theory. Prior to this, he worked for Google in the area of Relation Extraction, IBM Research on a project about Social Network Analysis, Bioserve Space Technology and various start-up companies in Italy.

Jochen Frey is the CTO for Scout Labs and brings significant technical leadership and experience in scalable systems development and natural language processing to the organization. As CTO of Meaningful Machines for 5 years, Frey managed a combined onshore/offshore research and development team and deployed over $1mil in hardware to launch the world’s highest quality machine translation system (Spanish to English, with high quality prototypes for other languages including Arabic and French). He architected and oversaw implementation of high performance, failure tolerant message passing infrastructure and developed a high-speed 200GB distributed full text index. Prior to Meaningful Machines, Frey was the Director of Technology for the Eastern Region at Razorfish (previously iCube), architecting and overseeing numerous large-scale systems implementations. His past experience also includes software engineering for the US Navy and software design of risk management tools for Dresdner Bank in Frankfurt, Germany. Frey has his MS / Diplom Ingenieur in Computer Science and Medicine from the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg.

David Bean, PhD, Chief Technology Officer, Semantic Technologies, Attensity
In his role as CTO David is focused on the development of technologies that better manage and deliver superior natural language processing applications. David is the author/recipient of six patents and has over sixteen pending software patents. He is an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the University of Utah’s Linguistics Department, where he teaches applied computational linguistics. David is a sought-after guest lecturer to a wide range of commercial and academic groups. He is also passionate about lecturing at the elementary school level to introduce young minds to astronomy, physics and other cool science things. Prior to Attensity, David was an IS director and an independent consultant in the healthcare industry.

Esteban Kolsky is the Founder and Principal of ThinkJar LLC, a research and consulting organization focused on multi-channel Experience Management. He currently helps clients determine how to design, implement, and manage better experiences for communities and customers across all channels, including the new media and social channels. He also conducts research on SCRM and Communiities, which is distributed through his blog “CRM Intelligence and Strategies”.
Esteban has over 22 years of experience in the Customer Service and CRM space, spending more than ten of those years working as a consultant and advisor to some of the largest global organizations on their strategies for Customer Service, CRM and Experience Management. He also spent eight years at Gartner as an analyst writing about the future of CRM and CEM, including coining the concepts for Enterprise Feedback Management and Collaborative Customer Service, two of the hottest trends in social media.

Register Here!

I am finally catching up on uploading videos from our past meetups. That was my 2010 resolution!

If you remember on October 13 our guest speaker was an incredibly talented Amber Naslund from Radian6.

Amber Naslund

Amber is a social media and marketing crackerjack and the Director of Community for Radian6, where she’s responsible for client engagement, community building, and helping companies tap the potential of online reputation management, customer engagement, and social media monitoring. She’s spent the last decade or so raising funds, building brands for companies of all sizes, and messing with all things online.

Here is a brief synopsis of her presentation:

It seems that Social Media is the latest darling of corporations. Wherever you turn, a new Twitter or Community is popping up, or a Facebook page is being deployed. The speed at which is all being released leaves almost no time for the important work of strategy and measurement. The end result is either unsatisfied expectations due to poor or no measurement, or utter confusion as to what metrics are important and how to track them.
A new breed of measurement and analytics solutions has come up in the market. Known as Social Media Monitors, they track all the relevant information for a brand, and display in very powerful, interactive dashboards and reports that also allows for integration into the corporate data warehouse for end-to-end tracking of the Social Media metrics.
Radian6 is the de-facto market leader in this new market, and the one that has built-in integrations with a large number of vendors that provide enterprise applications and social software. In this fast-paced, very informative panel they will answer the following questions:
* what is the difference between a social media metric and a regular one?
*why do you have to measure and justify a social media deployment?
* how can you track an end-to-end process with social components?
* what are you going to do with the data you collect?

Her presentation:

Event Summary

by Karen Kay

Date:  December 1, 200

Dr. Mark Drapeau is a biological scientist, government and private-sector consultant, and prolific writer on science, technology, innovation, government, and society. He is currently an adjunct faculty member in the School of Media and Public Affairs at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C

Dr Drapreau was brought to D.C. as a Fellow and worked inside the Defense Department in the National War College focused on Center for Technology and Big Trends around security for the nation.

As part of his research he explored several social media conferences and one that stood out was the Ogilvy Event that was hosted by Mashable.  Several ideas arose from this conference:

-          Was wondering why the government did not do this.

-          Kept attending more Web 2.0 events and created a road map including how USDA and CIA are using networks.

-          Obama election made this topic cause a wildfire of ideas.

-          Left the government world.

Social networking is a good thing

Not always obvious where it will lead, but it will become obvious later.  If the government uses it, should it be social networking or collaborative networking - less fun - more business. It’s controversial in the government arena and probably being fought in big companies.

Attending the SuperNova conference this week and one session he highlighted was with Anil Dash.

Anil Dash, Expertlabs is starting to hook up decision makers with people who need ideas - crowd sourcing .  Dash’s current role is directing Expert Labs, a non-profit, independent group with a mandate to help policy makers in the U.S. Federal Government utilize the expertise of their fellow citizens (from Wikipedia)

Dr. Mark encouraged us to checkout Web 2.0 Conference and learn how we can help our country without being part of the government.   This includes how to connect the disparate communities with the policy makers.

Advertising your ignorance - is a strong move

Some companies are advertising their need for input from the community and are using this knowledge to make better products.  One example is DARPA.  They have presented a challenge for someone to design a car that can drive through the dessert for xx days.

On Saturday, December 5th, 2009 at 10:00am EST, DARPA will launch ten 8-foot red balloons across the United States. If the “I Spy A Red Balloon” team is the first to submit the locations of the 10 balloons, the $40,000 prize will be donated to the American Red Cross (copied from Karen Kay’s Facebook on I Spy Red Balloon).

Word of Mouth

NASA Mars Rover is an example of using social media to get your community involved.  It became a Social billboard.

Communities and networks are great so that you can filter a lot of ideas. This is not the only thing you should have going - still stay in touch with CNN and local newspaper.

The power of the social networks is at the edges of new ideas.  One example is that the Navy does not necessarily employ the entire workforce of the brightest scientist, but they are resourceful in that they have figured out a way to share and expand their knowledge beyond their internal community.  They are doing this through social networking vehicles.

Social networking can lead to more involvement from the community with the government.

If you want something changed in the government - you need to fight the battle for a long time.  You need to have better reasons and connections and keep going.

Customers.. How to deal with them? Especially now - they come and comment on your products and services everywhere! And… ask service/support questions - EVERYWHERE:  on Twitter, Facebook, their own blogs, etc.. Is it possible for companies to provide reasonable support at a reasonable cost across all these new (and old) channels?

These and many other questions were discussed at a meetup for Silicon Valley executives this week.

Panel discussions were moderated by Esteban Kolsky - the Founder and Principal of ThinkJar LLC, a research and consulting organization focused on multi-channel Experience Management.

Our panelists were:

Kira Wampler, Online Engagement Leader, Small Business Group, Intuit

From the beginning of her career, Kira Wampler has been passionately dedicated to customers. She had to given that her first job out of college was co-founder and president of her own company. She learned quickly that if you don’t serve your customers, you don’t eat! Nearly fifteen years later, Kira continues to bring her passion for customers to life at Intuit by driving community, social media and online engagement efforts that small business owners succeed. Prior to her current role, Kira helped launch Intuit’s community for budding entrepreneurs and developed Intuit’s Small Business Group’s policies, strategy and testing efforts around Word of Mouth Marketing. Kira received her MBA from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and can be found on the social web on Twitter @kirasw.

Waladeen Norwood, Program Manger, Social Media, Consumer Support Organization

Waladeen Norwood recently joined HP in the Global Unassisted Support Organization as a Social Media Program Manger working on developing strategies for supporting consumers over new social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter. Before joining HP, Waladeen consulted for Broadjam.com, one of the largest Web 2.0 online communities for independent musicians. While completing his graduate studies, he helped Broadjam.com develop strategies to grow its song metadata business using wiki crowdsourcing methods.

Natalie Petouhoff, Senior Senior Analyst, Customer Service at Forrester Research

Natalie serves Business Process & Applications professionals, Customer Experience professionals, customer service and social media professionals as part of the business and process applications group at Forrester. As a leading expert, she is often quoted in the press and on television on how the top companies provide great experiences and retain loyal customers. She reviews customer service vendors and provides leaders with guidance on how to integrate social media applications and platforms into the contact center and the customer experience. Her research on customer service best practices via the FastForward Innovation Framework includes six areas around people, process, and technology, as well as integrating organizational change management as part of an initiative to reduce risk and ensure higher ROI for the investment. In addition, Natalie’s model on the ROI of social media is helping companies justify this as part of their enterprise technology and customer experience strategy.

Natalie has more than 20 years of leadership experience in management consulting and systems integration firms, including PricewaterhouseCoopers Consulting, Hitachi Consulting, and BenchmarkPortal. Her years of practical experience in industry were gained at companies like General Electric, Sony Pictures, General Motors, and Hughes Electronics. Natalie is also the author of four books:

•Reinventing Your Contact Center: Managers Guide To Managing Multi-Channel Contact Centers
•Integrating Your People with Process and CRM Technology: Change Management That Provides An ROI
•CRM: The Bottom Line to Optimizing Your ROI
•Recruiting and Retaining Call Center Employees
Natalie’s articles appear in BusinessWeek, CRM Magazine, Customer Interactions Solutions, CustomerThink.com, Fast Company, The New York Times, and Peppers and Rogers 1-to-1 Magazine.

As accomplished public speaker, Natalie is a keynote speaker at events including, Destination CRM Evolution Conference, ICMI Conference, Call Center 2.0, Shared Insights Self-Service Conference, SOCAP, and Pepperdine’s Business Forum.

Here is a video recording of the first hour of this panel:

This is just an example on how Google Wave could be used for pre, during and after event. And also gives you a feel on how Google Wave functions within a blog.

We have very good discussions on event management wave best practices within this wave.

Your comments/suggestions are greatly appreciated!

Tatyana (@glfceo)

Moderator: Alan Silberberg, CEO You2Gov, His business focus is to address the need for everyday people to get in touch with their legislative officials in all 50 States.

Panel: Debra Bowen, California Secretary of State, Beth Kanter, Fellow at Packard Foundation, Gwyneth Gailbraith, Director of Development and Evaluation, Opportunity Fund

Initial thoughts on social media use in their respective areas:

Debra Bowen commented on the need to engage people in the process.  The voter outreach program, as one example, showed the need to work collaboratively and leverage networks to effectively stay in touch by using Social Media.

Beth Kanter highlighted that by taking advantage of the social cultures out there and encouraging conversation through social media that when you do need to “rally” an effort, you already have a passionate audience engaged.

Gwyneth Gailbraith is focused on small business lending, match savings programs for education and small business ventures.  Social media helps them build a field for the U.S.  There are taking small steps to integrate social media into their outreach programs.

Non-profits and how they intersect with the government.  How to use these tools to effectively?

Alan - fear of change - some feel that their livelihoods may disappear because they will be replaced by these tools.

Debra brought up a great point that with this new media, you increase communication, which is great.  However, you still have the same number of staff to respond.  You need to come up with a process to encourage people to seek first for the information on the web-site and if it’s not on the web-site - then send in a question.  This is still a work in process.  Biggest hurdle for adoption - government officials are not tech experts and that due to 140 characters - subtleties can be lost.  Once you hit enter - it’s out there.

Beth introduced the idea of network weaving.  She has developed a way to get her network to become self-organized and she acts more as a project manager.  She will start conversations and let the network takeover the discussion.  Some monitoring and input from her will keep the conversation flowing.

Beth used the Michael Vick story as an example.  When he decided to come back and volunteer with the humane society - their social media person -raised the visibility of this activity, people were allowed to vent their opinions, have a conversation and then eventually the situation was diffused.

Gwyneth reminded that due to her audience it is necessary to take baby steps right now.  Have found volunteers to help them by tweeting and giving them guidance on where they should be focused.  One problem they would like to solve is the immense reporting requirements for CDFI funds, as an example.  They are exploring how to use social media to make this process easier.

Alan revisited his idea of fear of change.  If he was able to build a web-site in 41 days, but when you take this conversation to a government agency - there is a six month bid and longer decision making process.  Is there fear of change or people losing their livelihoods?

Debra - you need to involve people in the formative part of the project.  This allows for people to be part of the process and gain their buy-in.

Beth - most of the fear is from within.  If a non-profit does not have a social internal culture, you need to create this before you can go external.  Common concerns she has heard from non-profits include: “It will make us look more human”, “opens us up to public criticism and we prefer it does not exist”, etc., etc.  It will open the floodgates of information and that will overload us.

Alan asked Gwyneth:  “Are small business adopting these tools?”

Gwyneth’s response:  Not all businesses need a social media strategy.  A child care business in a home does not need a web-site, etc.   Really need to have a social media plan to understand what you are trying to achieve and not necessarily try to do everything.    Need to show clients how their information will be used and the good results and potential pitfalls.  Most are really excited to know that people all over the world are inspired by their story.

Some general trends discussed included:

1.      Alan spoke about the most recent Iran election and the tools were used to help promote  an information forum to help with the election process.

2.      How do you bring a social media strategy into an organization - Beth mentioned that have a group of people model the behavior you want them to adopt.

3.      Non-profits that need help with starting their social media projects - Beth said on her twitter site there is a list of non-profit twitters and chose the non-profit tech twitters.

4.      Debra brought up using social media, once you are established and familiar,can take as little as 10 minutes a day.

I thoroughly enjoyed this event.  There was a great group of non-profits in the audience who were impressed with the valuable information they received.  Good networking exchange before and after the event.  The group was large enough for broad conversations, but small enough that you got a chance to meet and exchange ideas with several people.

Karen Kay
karenlee.kay@gmail.com