Bay Area CIO/IT Executives Meetups: Blog

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:

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:

“ Excellent topic and Great speakers. It was an wonderful opportunity to meet with Anthony Lye, SVP Products, Oracle. Thanks Tatyana for organizing this event. ”
“ A great opportunity to learn about this moving target of Social CRM. There is a ton of info and mis-info out there. It’s especially beneficial to exchange ideas in person and not just in the cloud. ”
“ Insightful comments from Chris Carfi, Tony Nemelka, Anthony Lye, Lyle Fong, Esteban Kolsky, all experts in CRM. Very useful to hear what enterprises are doing — or not doing — to incorporate social media in their CRM efforts. Thank you, Tatyana! ”

Feedback says it all!

Greatly anticipated panel discussions on SCRMdefinitely met expectations!

More about the panel:
Moderator: Esteban Kolsky

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.

Lyle Fong, CEO and Co-Founder Lithium

Lyle Fong is the CEO & Co-Founder of Lithium Technologies, the leading provider of Social CRM solutions to power the customer network. Working with market leaders such as Best Buy, Sony, AT&T, Research In Motion Limited (RIM), Univision, and PayPal, Lithium is delivering the next generation of customer relationships, combining the power of online customer communities with the broader social web and traditional CRM business processes to inspire customers to innovate, promote, and support on the company’s behalf.

Prior to starting Lithium Technologies, Lyle co-founded GX Media, where he was the CTO. He drove the development of Gamers.com, which was rated the #1 independent gaming portal by Nielsen NetRatings. Lyle was instrumental in raising a total of $15M in funding led by CMGI, negotiating multi-million dollar technology licensing deals with Dell, Sony, AltaVista, and Ziff-Davis, and spearheading the spin-off of Lithium Technologies. Lyle was also the driving force behind the creation of technologies for professional gaming, including a global rankings system, tournament engine, and a real-time match reporting and spectating system. These technologies were the key success factors behind the AMD PGL, the most successful and highly acclaimed professional gaming league to date with over 100 million media impressions, and also numerous tournaments for Sega.

Anthony Lye, SVP Products, Oracle

Anthony Lye is the senior vice president of CRM, responsible for the Oracle CRM and Siebel CRM On Demand businesses worldwide at Oracle. Previously Mr. Lye was the group vice president of CRM Products at Oracle, responsible for Oracle’s CRM product strategy and product management for CRM in the applications development organization.

Prior to joining Oracle in 2006, Mr. Lye was the group vice president and GM of CRM products at Siebel Systems. Anthony was responsible for Siebel’s vertical and horizontal CRM application technologies. Mr. Lye managed and directed all of Siebel’s enterprise application strategy, product marketing and product management.

Prior to Siebel, Mr. Lye spent six years as president and CEO of ePeople, a company he ran with help and investment from David Stamm, founder of Clarify and Steve Goldsworthy, founder of Vantive. Prior to ePeople, Mr. Lye was the vice president of marketing at Categoric Software in the enterprise event management business, was senior director and general manager at Remedy Corporation for five years for global major accounts, strategic alliances and Remedy’s international business operations. Mr. Lye also worked in product marketing at Tivoli Systems and was a management consultant focused on distributed systems at Arthur Anderson, now Accenture, in the financial services vertical in London and New York.

Anthony Nemelka, Social CRM Pioneer and former CEO of Helpstream

Tony Nemelka is the co-founder and former CEO of Helpstream, Inc., a venture-backed Software-as-a-Service company located in Mountain View, California. Tony was the visionary behind Helpstream when he and co-founder Dan Hardy set out to design and develop a radically new software application for customer service and customer relationship management – now referred to as Social CRM.
Tony’s vision of infusing business processes with social technologies made available via the Web, and leveraging online communities to drive more effective interaction and engagement between companies and their customers, resulted in one of the first commercially available and highly acclaimed Social CRM products in the market – Helpstream. Tony served as Helpstream’s CEO from January 2006 through July 2009.

Prior to Helpstream, Tony was Vice President of the Asia Pacific region at Adobe Systems, responsible for sales and services across a region that includes both the fastest growing and most technologically sophisticated markets in the world — China, India, Japan, Korea, Southeast Asia, and Australia. He lived in Japan for several years where he was Founder and CEO of Epiphany Japan and General Manager and President of PeopleSoft Japan. He speaks fluent Japanese and some Chinese. Tony started his career at IBM, spending 13 years marketing a wide variety of hardware, software, and services across multiple industries from 1986 through 1998.

Christopher Carfi, Author of The Social Customer Manifesto and Thought Leader in SCRM

Currently, I’m a co-founder of Cerado, Inc.
We work with companies to help them to understand what their customers are thinking (by doing crazy things like going out and having conversations with those customers). We also help our clients understand what their competitors are doing, so they can thwart them at every turn. Most of our customers turn to us for services such as Win/Loss Analysis and Competitive Intelligence*.
I’ve spent the last six or so years working with organizations to help them better connect with their customers at a real, non-synthetic level. Hence the interests in things like blogs, wikis, and social networks.

Photos from the event:

The main point has been proved: SCRM is REAL!

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