A new report from Hurwitz & Associates seeks to put text analytics vendors in context. In an environment where unstructured text accounts for 80 percent of the data available to companies, the market analyst and research firm has prepared a Victory Index to help companies suss out who can best help them get value from this information.

By providing the ability to analyze unstructured text, extract relevant information, and transform it into structured information, “text analytics has become a key component of a highly competitive company’s analytics arsenal,” write report authors Fern Halper, partner and principal analyst; Marcia Kaufman, COO and principal analyst; and Daniel Kirsh, senior analyst. Often, the research firm notes, companies begin to experiment with text analytics to gain insight into the unstructured text that abounds in social media, and from that move on to other use cases. For instance, they’ll discover value in mining unstructured data and using it with structured data to improve predictive models.

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Image Courtesy; Flickr/Sean MacEntee

When it comes to social CRM, it’s a world of semantics, and text and sentiment analytics.

Recently Gartner released its Magic Quadrant report on the space, and a reading of it makes it pretty clear that the category, which the research group defines as “a business strategy that generates opportunities for sales, marketing and customer service, while also benefiting online communities,” demands such intelligence.

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August is get-away month, so the hospitality industry should start gearing up for what happens when all those travelers get back home….and start to record their impressions of the properties at which they stayed across the social media landscape.

Last week saw the integration of Lexalytics’ sentiment analytics engine into Revinate’s software-as-a-service social media reviews-tracking solution for the hotel industry. In the fairly recent past, Aptech Computer Systems signed on to use Clarabridge’s sentiment and text analytics software for its Execuvue Business Intelligence software for hotel operators. And many other names in the social analytics space, from Attensity to SAS, also see the hospitality sector as a key segment when it comes to mining customer sentiment. At this spring’s Sentiment Analytics symposium, Lexalytics CEO Jeff Catlin called “travel and tourism a natural spot to use it. There’s a lot of data feeding back all the time that helps them make money,” he said. “You can learn things when you’re scoring tones on certain attributes.”

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Photo Courtesy, Flickr, coolinsights

How do you know that social media customer analytics has arrived? When big consulting companies decide they want more and more pieces of it.

Consider the move last week by Capgemini Group to partner its business processing outsourcing organization with text analytics vendor Attensity. Capgemini will use the latter’s software that helps companies monitor, analyze and act on customer conversations taking place across social media venues as part of its Social Insight Into Action consulting offering. The new service is said to be a customizable, all-in-one package that covers web listening and analytics in social media, and that uses feedback gained from these online sources to help companies modify business processes to better engage with these audiences.

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With the Text Analytics Summit about to get underway, we’re seeing a wave of vendor announcements hit, such as Clarabridge’s news earlier this week. SAS also said today that it’s introduced Industry Taxonomy Rules starter kits, prebuilt add-ons to SAS Enterprise Content Categorization for speeding text analytics implementation efforts. Also on the agenda: Attensity’s announcement of Analyze 6 and its latest vertical out-of-the-box analytics capabilities, aimed at the retail banking industry.

The focus for Analyze 6 was to take the key capabilities of Attensity’s core engine and use that to put text analytics on the desktops of business users who want to understand and respond to customer data – at the speed of social media, which means without waiting for IT experts to create reports for them. “The thing about social media and customer data is it is like a tidal wave,” Attensity CMO Michelle de Haaff says.

Building on its Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) Platform Data Grid computing system for helping enterprises quickly analyze large-scale data sets, end users can select from over 100 report templates (with multiple kinds of analytics for each), or they can choose what questions to ask through its new Exploration environment. Basically, that’s a wizard-based way to drill deeper into a category set, leveraging Attensity’s pre-defined semantic classes tailored for each specific vertical industry rather than having to predefine taxonomies themselves to look at data.

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Alta Plana Corp.’s Seth Grimes last week pinpointed text analytics market demand as closing in on the $1 billion mark globally, with growth in particular among apps that use NLP to derive business insight (from facts to relationships to sentiment) via social networks, online media, and/or surveys. Among such applications are Clarabridge’s Enterprise and Professional sentiment and text analytics software, which now include features such as embedded connections to some major social media monitoring sources with today’s release of its Tower version 4.5 edition.

On the social media source front, Clarabridge says that users now can directly access data pulled from Lithium, NM Incite Buzzmetrics and Radian6 without leaving its interface, for faster access to conversations and insights. Its new Voice of the Customer (VOC) source framework accomplishes this and is designed to easily adapt to additional sources in the future, as well. Companies could previously add this data to their Clarabridge solutions but not seamlessly, as they can for accommodating social media data from sources like Twitter and Facebook.

Among companies that are looking to create a multichannel Voice-of-the-Customer solution, as Clarabridge brands it, “the majority are using multiple listening platforms today, including Lithium for forums, Bazaarvoice for ratings and reviews, a wide variety of EFM platforms, and social media aggregators like Radian6 and/or Nielsen Buzzmetrics,” CEO Sid Banerjee told the Semantic Web Blog in an email conversation. In addition, companies also often integrate CRM data, email, live chat, and even news data, he says, so they need a single platform to integrate, commonly categorize and quantify sentiment across these sources.

“If you use multiple tools, you get different outputs, and you can’t compare the insights in an apples-to-apples manner,” he says. “Point solutions also don’t easily deploy across an enterprise.”

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Image Courtesy: Flickr/Lori Greig

It doesn’t matter whether this month you celebrate Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, the Winter Solstice, or anything else. In December, most everyone’s thoughts turn to presents. So, what makes it to the top of some semantic web and data experts’ holiday gift lists for their friends, family, colleagues – the world?

We asked, and their (mostly) semantic-web inspired holiday lists include some real and some imagined – not to mention imaginative – ideas. Read on:

John Breslin, Lecturer and researcher at NUI Galway, Creator of SIOC

If I could give out some Christmas tools or tips to colleagues or friends, the first would be to try out Drupal 7 on their own website, and get the metadata out there. I’d also ask that my friends show their friends some of the cool semantically-powered tools like Siri or Sig.ma to show the power of linking things together with semantics. Finally, in terms of useful non-semantic free programs, I’d give out Evernote, Dropbox, Inkscape, the Gimp, and TweetDeck (great for multiple keyword searches like “semantic web” OR semanticweb OR “sem web” OR semweb). Oh, and an online backup program of your choice, like Mozy or CrashPlan!

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Photo credit: Flickr/Hamed Parham

If your business hasn’t yet begun exploring how it can better understand and respond to the thoughts and opinions about it that consumers share with the world on social media, it may not be long before it does.

Gartner recently released its list of the top ten strategic technologies for 2011, and among the categories on that list was social analytics. The research firm describes social analytics as including techniques ranging from social filtering to social-network analysis to sentiment analysis and social-media analytics.

Those categories – or at least a fair number of the offerings falling into them – owe a lot of their existence to semantic web technologies and standards, from NLP to RDF. As Gartner sums it up, “social network analysis tools are useful for examining social structure and interdependencies” and “involves collecting data from multiple sources, identifying relationships, and evaluating the impact, quality or effectiveness of a relationship.”

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