Mining Our Knowledge: Part 2

There’s been a bit of a gap since I last posted, I ‘m blaming that on Christmas holidays, nasty colds, training courses and starting an MSc. Anyway I thought I’d start again, where I left off before the Christmas holidays: text mining!

How do companies use text mining?

It’s a fact that companies have clicked that text mining is a very useful tool and demand for these tools has increased in the last few years. Especially, in the media, retail, insurance, travel and hospitality business sectors. Companies are using text mining tools for “brand management, reputation management…competitive intelligence...and customer experience management” (Grimes 2009, p.1).

Why do companies find text mining useful?

A couple of reasons really have contributed to the increasing popularity of text mining in the commercial sector. Firstly there's been a rapid increase of unstructured data available to organisations via the internet and through internal data collation exercises. Secondly companies have increasingly adopted a ‘Return on Investment’ mentality for all areas of their business including how they handle their data and lastly, and perhaps most significantly the technology behind text mining and business intelligence tools has simply gotten a lot better (Clarabridge n.d.a, p.2).

As well as this, there’s also a drive in some sectors to reduce customer churn. Churn management is the concept of "identifying those customers who are intending to move their custom to a competing service provider” (Hadden et al. 2005, p.2902). Organisations are recognising that retaining customers ensures their long-term sustainability, for example, T-Mobile Austria implemented text analytics software in 2006 and achieved a 20% reduction in the number of customers leaving the organisation to go elsewhere (Kim et al., 2004;Portrait Software, 2009).

Companies are also placing a focus on customer experience management which is “the practice of listening to customers, analyzing what they are saying to make better business decisions and measuring the impact of those decisions to drive organizational performance and loyalty” (Clarabridge, n.d.b). Companies are looking managing every aspect of the customer’s journey from the service delivery, to promoting the organisations brand, to building better products and services. It helps to improve churn rates and cost savings, and increase profits in the long-term (ibid).

Another focal point, is that companies are trying to gage their customers sentiments about them and their products or services. Sentiment analysis “provides companies with a means to estimate the extent of product acceptance and to determine strategies to improve product quality. It also facilitates policy makers or politicians to analyse public sentiments with respect to policies, public services or political issues” (Prabowo and Thelwall 2009, p.143)

Some common uses of text mining?

I’ve already mentioned several ways that companies are using these tools, I’ve just picked a few examples that spell out the benefits of using text mining.

Example 1

A case study of Cincinnati Zoo demonstrates the benefits of CEM. The zoo had several non-integrated systems for different functions of the zoo, which made it hard to track customer-spending habits. The implementation of CEM software in 2010 has helped the zoo to integrate its systems to track customer-spending habits. The information helped to launch a customer loyalty scheme to decrease churn rates and an estimated 50,000 new visitors are expected in the first year after its launch (Brunelli, 2011).

Example 2

The benefits of using text mining to conduct sentiment analysis were demonstrated by a successful campaign by Mindshare UK to recruit new customers for First Direct, a retail bank. Mindshare mined existing customer’s comments about the bank using sentiment analysis techniques and used both positive and negative comments in an advertising campaign. The success of the campaign saw First Direct win more customers and Mindshare win a highly coveted marketing award (Twentyman, 2011).

A quick summary

Facts are facts; the information age has enabled organisations to evolve from being ‘data poor’ to ‘data rich’. But some organisations are still ‘knowledge poor’, lacking the resources to deal with the flood of data now available. Text mining techniques are evolving and offer organisations in the commercial sector, a variety of tools and techniques to manage and enhance this flood of data. Tools like customer experience management and sentiment analysis make the process, of turning information into actionable knowledge, a lot easier (Choudhary, 2009; Gopal et al,2011).

References

BRUNELLI, M., 2011. Cincinnati Zoo monkeys around with business analytics software. SearchBusinessAnalytics.com, [online] Available at: [cited 22 March 2011].

CHOUDHARY, A.K., OLUIKPE, P.I., HARDING, J.A. and CARILLO, P.M., 2009. The needs and benefits of text mining applications on Post-Project Reviews. Computers in Industry[online]. 60 [cited 12 March 2011] pp.728-740.

CLARABRIDGE, (n.d.a), Text Mining’s Moment: The three trends triggering commercial adaptation. clarabridge.com, [online] Available at: [cited 1 March 2011].

CLARABRIDGE, n.d.b. Customer Experience Success through Text Analytics. clarabridge.com, [online] Available at: [cited 1 March 2011].

GOPAL, R., MARSDEN, J.R., and VANTHIENEN, J., 2011., Information Mining – Reflections on recent advancements and the road ahead in data, text and media mining, Decision Support Systems[online]. Article in Press [cited 25 March 2011].

GRIMES, S., 2009. Text Analytics 2009: User Perspectives on Solutions and Providers, An Alta Plana research study sponsored by Clarabridge. clarabridge.com, [online] [cited 1 March 2011].

HADDEN, J., TIWARI, A., ROY, R. and RUTA, D., 2007. Computer assisted customer churn management: State-of-the-art and future trends. Computers & Operations Research[online]. 34 [cited 17 March 2011] pp.2902-2917. 

HEARST, M., 2003. What is text mining?. Berkeley, [online] Available at: [cited 2 March 2011].

KIM, M., PARK, M. and JEONG, D., 2004. The effects of customer satisfaction and switching barrier on customer loyalty in Korean mobile telecommunications services. Telecommunications Policy. 28 pp.145–159. cited by HADDEN, J., TIWARI, A.,
PORTRAIT SOFTWARE, 2009. A Portrait Software case study, Portrait Software, [online] Available at: [cited 20 March 2011].

PRABOWO, R. and THELWALL, M., 2009. Sentiment Analysis: A combined approach. Journal of Informetrics[online]. 3 (2) [cited 11 March 2011] pp. 143-157. 

THE 451 GROUP, 2005. Text-aware Applications: The Endgame for Unstructured Data Analysis. cited by CLARABRIDGE, 2008. Text Mining’s Moment: The three trends triggering commercial adaptation. clarabridge.com, [online] Available at: [cited 1 March 2011].

TWENTYMAN, J., 2011. Sentiment analysis at work: a sentimental education for the data rich. Search data management, [online] Available at: [cited 15 March 2011].

 

How all of us are changing the web: Part 2

In my digibored post 'How all of us are changing the web: Part 1', I talked about User Generated Content (UGC) and Crowdsourcing and how we have used them to change the web as we know it today. This is a follow up; I’ve picked out a few common ways that we use UGC and crowdsourcing. There are plenty of others, but for digibored I only need a few to highlight my points. If you want a fuller list, wiki the terms.

1. Ratings and Reviews - UGC
2. Tagging Stuff - UGC
3. Citizen Science - Crowdsourcing
4. Citizen Media - Crowdsourcing

Ratings and Reviews

This is probably one of the most common forms of UGC. A lot of us shop online (figure here). I know personally, every time I make a purchase on Amazon or Ebay, I’m prompted to rate and review what I’ve bought. I know I often check user ratings because it’s damn confusing with the sheer number of similar products on offer. And it’s just not shopping when I use my local public library service, reserving books online, again I have the option to rate and review my loans. So what we think of our purchases are a vital resource in the online marketplace.

For example, a study by Comscore revealed that online user-generated reviews influence one in four of us when we are purchasing a product or service online (2007). That makes our ratings, our reviews very influential, in fact Williams & Co. add to this saying that:

1. “Research has shown that many people trust other people’s reviews more than they trust expert opinion”

2. “There is a strong relation between positive reviews of a product or service and satisfaction with sales” (2010, p118).

Tagging Stuff

Have you ever tagged something online? No, are you sure?

What about tagging people in one of your pictures on Facebook? Or how about retweeting posts and adding hashtags to entries, on Twitter? If you have done, then, you’ve generated content online.  

We can assign keywords to various content, whether that’s a document on a intranet, a blog, a picture or a video that we’ve uploaded. This started off as a metadata tagging where we could choose a preset word in an online database to describe an item to help it be found again when we search for it. It’s evolved into folksonomy, where we can tag something with our own words which is what we tend to on platforms like Flickr and YouTube (Vander Wal, 2007).

Point is that tagging helps us to find things easier online and in the case of twitter and other social networking sites, it allows us to recycle and reshare content (Huang et al., 2010).

Citizen Science

What is it about the worked ‘citizen’ it just makes me think of worker ants…

Talking of worker ants, the science research sector has successfully tapped into crowdsourcing to help create citizen science. We all get a chance to be scientists finally; putting to use that home lab kit you got as a present from your mum or dad when you were nine. Well, you get to use for something other than blowing up your bedroom …Sorry Mum…  

Anyway back to the topic, ‘Citizen Science’ is about the average person helping with research on a range of scientific subjects. For example, in some companies are using services Innocentive to place scientific challenges to an open audience and awarding a prize fee for the best solutions. We can also contribute by sharing our spare computing power to help create a free online open-source lab for researchers for things like cancer research etc. by downloading World Community Grid Software (Howe, 2006; The Marketer, 2011).

      Citizen Journalism

There’s that ‘citizen’ word again. This time it’s being used by the media. ‘Citizen Journalism’ has become an extremely popular and vital resource in today’s day and age. It lets us report events as they happen. Essentially, citizen journalism involves “a wide range of activities in which everyday people contribute information or commentary about news events” (Educause, 2007).
     

Citizen journalism is used by major news providers like the BBC and CNN, as well as amateur news sites such as Cyber Journalist as well as blogs and video sharing sites. In fact Twitter posts are the main source of information via the Google real-time service (Educause, 2007, Google, N.D.).

Richard Sambrook, a BBC journalist summed up the benefit of citizen journalism in 2009 saying that “when major events occur, the public can offer us as much new information as we are able to broadcast to them. From now on, news coverage is a partnership”

Lets sum up

I’ve told you four ways that I think have helped us all to change the web, its nots a complete list, its not meant to be. In fact UGC and crowdsourcing aren’t the only ways that we are making web better, but like I said in my last digibored post there are two drivers. There are not perfect, in fact they have a few flaws i.e.  citizen journalism has been criticised for accuracy. The stories posted on  the CNN’s citizen journalism site iReport site “are not edited, fact checked or screened before they are posted” Despite their flaws, UGC and crowdsourcing are helping us to improve the web and its us using our ability to create content online that is helping to change the web. 


Hey, if you wanna read more about crowdsourcing, check out 'Here Comes Everybody' by Clay Shirky. A lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University recomended it to me and it really got me into this subject.

Next post -  I'm switching pace and topics with my next digibored post... see you next time!

References

CNN, n.d. CNN iReport. [online] Available at: <http://ireport.cnn.com/> [Accessed 15 February 2011].

COMSCORE, 2007. Online Consumer-Generated Reviews Have Significant Impact on Offline Purchase Behaviour. [online] Available at: <http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2007/11/Online_Consumer_Reviews_Impact_Offline_Purchasing_Behavior> [Accessed 21 February 2011].

EDUCAUSE, 2007. 7 things you should know about citizen journalism. [online] Educause. Available at: http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI7031.pdf [Accessed 23 February 2011].

Google, n.d. See what's new for Realtime Search.[online] Available at:  <http://www.google.com/landing/realtime/> [Accessed 24 February 2011].

HOWE, J., 2006b. The Rise of Crowdsourcing, wired magazine. [online] Available at:  <http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/crowds.html> [Accessed 21 February 2011].

HUANG, J., THORNTON, K.M. and Efthimiadis, E.N., 2010. Conversational Tagging in Twitter, HT’10, pp13–16, [online] Available at: http://jeffhuang.com/Final_TwitterTagging_HT10.pdf [Accessed 1 March 2011].

SAMBROOK, R., 2009. Citizen Journalism and the BBC, [online] Available at: <http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/reportsitem.aspx?id=100542> [Accessed 25 February 2011].

How all of us are changing the web: Part 1

As a 'digibored' person and an all round slow adopter, the fact that my presence on the web helps to develop it, hasn't completely escaped me. Sure I'm a little late to the party but I’m still contributing to the web by creating user generated content, in fact lots of us are!

Like it or not, we are a hot commodity, there's plenty of organisations and institutions that have clocked the impact users like us have on the web. And they are asking for our help to develop their businesses in a variety of ways.  So this week, I’m going to talk about how all of us are helping to change the web by creating user generated content and how companies are harnessing that change through crowdsourcing.  

Where do i begin?

Let’s start at looking at the web and what we could or couldn't do until recently. When I started surfing I was in the world of Web 1.0 it was a view only web, where information was pushed to users by a small number of content creators/experts. It was like jumping on a bus, where for the most part you let the driver tell you where you were going.  

Then shiny Web 2.0 came along, being driven by us. It’s enabled us to collaborate with one another other and make contributions to it. Services on this web are now our platform, with the likes Blogger, Facebook, Flickr, Twitter and YouTube encouraging us to create, recreate, mashup and share content. If user contribution and collaboration have made web 2.0 a possibility, User Generated Content and Crowdsourcing can be considered amongst its drivers (O'Reilly, 2005). (I'm not going to mention Web 3.0, I don't think we're there yet, we'll talk about it in another digibored post).

What’s User Generated Content (UGC)?

OECD defines UGC as “content made publicly available over the Internet, which reflects a certain amount of creative effort and which is created outside of professional routines and practices” (2007, p.4).

Clay Shirky (2010) reckons that we are changing the way we spend our free time, replacing passive participation in front of a TV by actively participating, creating content on the Internet. This cultural shift has increased our personal ambitions to express ourselves in a way TV cannot offer. So as a result, we are creating user generated content. Its not a new concept, people have created UGC pre-internet i.e. writing for the Newspaper reader sections and producing programming on public access channels on American cable television.

However on the ‘collaborative’ web, UGC has exploded, helped along by Technological, Social, Economic and Legal factors. Technological developments include faster online access, accessible software tools and an increase in UGC hosting websites have contributed to increase participation i.e. Blogger, YouTube etc. Social attitudes have also changed with the emergence of the ‘digital natives’ who have grown up with the Internet (Shirky, 2010; OECD, 2007).

Lower costs associated with UGC have helped to create new business models i.e. Threadless.com. Flexible approaches to copyright i.e. Creative Common licenses have also allowed easier adaptation and distribution of UGC (Howe, 2008; OECD, 2007).

So what’s crowdsourcing then?

Jeff Howe coined the term crowdsourcing in a 2006 article for Wired magazine. He says that’s crowdsourcing “represents the act of a company or institution once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally large) network of people in the form of an open call…” (2006). 

He says that “Crowd-sourcing isn’t synonymous with user-generated content, but it often involves building a business around it” (2008, p.177). In essence, UGC refers to content created by users independently whereas crowdsourcing involves companies persuading the crowd to perform tasks traditionally done by employees.

So this was a look, albeit a brief one at UGC and Crowdsourcing, I’m aware that I’ve thrown a lot of definitions at you. There will be a part two to this blog entry, where I’ll outline four ways UGC and crowdsourcing have enhanced the way that we use the web.

References

HOWE, J., 2006, Crowdsourcing: A Definition. Crowdsourcing, [Blog] Available at:   <http://crowdsourcing.typepad.com/cs/2006/06/crowdsourcing_a.html> [Accessed 9 October 2011].

HOWE, J., 2008. Crowdsourcing, How the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business. London: Random House.

OECD, 2007. Participative Web: User-Created Content. [online] OECD. Available at: <http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/57/14/38393115.pdf> [Accessed 10 October 2011].

O'Reilly, T., 2005, What is Web 2.0, [online] O'REILLY.COM. Available at: <http://oreilly.com/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html> [Accessed 10 October 2011].

SHIRKY, C., 2010. Cognitive Surplus, Creativity and Genorisity in a Connected Age. London: Penguin.