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Need a marcom writer, analyst, or product strategist?

Do you need a great sector analysts or small 's' product strategy contract Product Manager?

Go Vertical!  Hire me to be your guide to industrial and skilled trade channels for your Web 2.0 Application. See my outreach proffer here.

I deliver actionable product strategies for web properties that may have started in the consumer or enterprise business sector, and I remake them for the services sector. My specialty is web services and applications that could be profitably re-targeted towards the 'hard' professions, i.e., technical product services, equipment services, skilled trades, etc.

If you have a Web 2.0 property that is slowing its uptake, never got a fast start, etc., you at least owe yourself a conversation with me. I can work the trade associations, survey new channels, and suggest new approaches and features.

Do you need re-writes of white papers, marketing collateral, or just a general de-funk of the language in your marketing package? I'm your man. I take dry, technical buzz and tell a compelling story about your product.

I work  well with product managers - I deliver! See my portfolio pages. What have I got to lose? See my linkedin profile to the right of the page. Reach me @ [email protected] or on skype: awilensky

The Demon Bride of Twitter

"I am eating"

"I am Going here..."

"I have Come from there"

"I have baked a cake"

"I am happy"

"I am sad"

"I am a Gentile, I am a Jew"

"I am at XYZ place;anyone here want to meet up?"

Phew....I worry about the Demon bride of Twitter - a swinging hip chick with a modern job in the crossover laced techno-branding sphere. Profiles on Flickr, Facebook, Myspace, and umpteen other presence services.

She is, by anyone's  measure, riding the new wave of social media. I'm sure she has a Second Life, if even only as a professional dalliance.

I worry about the Demon bride of Twitter. I worry about the industry as a whole the way I worry about family members. Maybe I need to worry more about my consulting practice?

(This conversation has been re-dramatized in a kind of Shakespearean  or Edwardian dramatic language, to make things interesting, but the intent of all dialog remains faithful,  and perhaps even more understandable if rendered in this fashion:

Check out this exchange in a presentation I was making at a large, established Silicon Peninsula Tech Giant:

"So consultant, impressive portfolio, no?, What have you for this hungry, hungry VP; something enticing, no? Something satisfying, current and smelling of the blood sacrifice?', thus spake the VP of Product Development. My answer, as in all times considered, was crafted in its structure from the times immemorial and has served me well:

Open Bid to the Brand Monitoring Industry

Image via Wikipedia

What causes the wholesale mis targeting of an entire emerging technical discipline?
Who Knows!

I can guess, however that the dozen or so companies pitching brand monitoring are  making  brand owners their initial target, because there seems to be roughly equivalent services being offered by classical agencies.

The problem with the head to head comparison is that classical brand equity consultants are inherently a decision support and steering service, while new age text mining for brand monitoring falls far, far short of steering anything.

But take heart, all who invested equity in these young and promising companies, for there is a sector that has been completely overlooked - the brand intermediaries. How do we re target this badly gone astray brand monitoring via CGM sector and get them on track to a market that will grow and pay?

Why, my dear Watson, simply hire the author of this weblog to engage in a six month product redesign cycle  and most of the investment made in your text mining product for brand monitoring can be re targeted at incremental cost towards the brand intermediaries and multi-line retail dealer market!

Download intermed.pdf

There is nothing inherently wrong with text mining of the wild corpus, but the slow uptake and faltering of the sector must be addressed via a serious re targeting towards customers that care.

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Limited Time - 30 day Product Strategy Critical Review

I am offering two 30 day review periods to company's desiring an outside, critical review of their product strategies. I have worked for some very prestigious clients, including France Telecom, and have several recommendations on my Linkedin profile (see my Linkedin badge on this page).

Why would you want me to take an outside look and generate an analysis of your sector and strategy? Well, let me tell you:

1. Your product strategy might have alternate channels that you may already be aware of. I can provide cost effective methodology to exploit and evangelize new markets with a small or zero incremental cost.
   
   
2. I almost always find alternate channels or vertical strategies that my clients were unaware of.
   
3. I deliver a complete section on exploiting these alternate channels. This has proven especially fecund in the Web Applications arena - many horizontal web services have vertical and B2B potential.
4. You may feel that your sector is in slower uptake for a new product or service than originally expected; I can often generate avenues for OEM, Partnership, and Licensing Opportunities.
5. You may have considered alternate channels and ran out of time, steam or resources. I can supply a road map that may be used for planning the appropriate delegation of a market evangelism campaign.

I am currently negotiating several long term contacts, and until these major engagements strike, I am offering these two 30 day engagements for the highly discounted rate of $7,500.00, I include all costs of materials and communications.

This offer might be withdrawn with my next call or courier; however, once I accept your engagement, it will take priority of order and will be completed on schedule. To see an example of my work, please see:

http://abmw.wordpress.com/portfolio-samples/sentiment-cgm-sector-analysis-2007/   

Brand Decisions are Grand Decisions

Brand Decisions are Grand Decisions

So, I often ask folks in the text mining industry, particularly the linguists and applied mathematicians that specialize in language detection, "have you ever read 100,000 customer service records, complaints, etc.?". I have.

Of course not. These folks, who are toiling in their applied sciences, must attack the challenges of computational linguistics with an expansive and intentionally non-specialized approach to text harvesting. Likewise, the well developed BI community has a certain orientation towards data visualization and raw statistics. Neither of these camps has the requisite  immersion in customer relations and the language of 'consumer perceptions' that occurs after a product is released into the hands of the public.

Don't get me started on the ersatz 'brand speak'  of the current early market entrants specializing in brand monitoring via sentiment analysis - I have made my opinions known, and those with far more august credentials have slapped me down good'o. This is all as it should be in the open media.

The brand intermediaries (multi-line dealers and retailers) that are the victims of branding decisions and the blunders of the brand owners are the fat part of a potentially untapped market being completely ignored by the brand monitoring leaders, both old school, as well as new age text harvesters. This is predictable, as the technology adoption curve has shown this myopia will occur across numerous innovation categories - the telephone (never envisioned to become a residential device), the computer ("might be useful for up to five of our largest corporations", Thomas J. Watson., the PC, (what do people want a computer in their home for?).

Whereas the old school brand equity and monitoring agencies have made a conscious and informed choice for the moment, not to take the mid-market into their plans for brand monitoring, the new entrants are just skating by the opportunity due to arrogance, hubris, and let's say, a lack of vision. Plus, it's harder to serve the mid-market with an affordable decision support service, than it is to deliver the current sentiment scoring clap-trap. 

Enough already, my position is known! What am I going to do about it as an independent analyst? Why, Dear Watson, I'm going to analyze, and then find a friendly technology leader to hire me as a consultant to implement these systems. Let us now break down the dynamics of Customer Perceptions and Interaction Outcomes in a semi-formal manner that is somewhat long for the blog format, however, I will condense the specifics to a few pages, and add a link at the bottom to a full white paper. Read On Babes:

 

Brand Monitoring and Text Mining Saved by the New Science of Consumer Perceptions and Interaction Outcomes

The brand intermediaries throw a curve ball while the early users of today's immature text mining services are non-plussed.

Although I'm generally classified as a self-employed 'business analyst', my sub specialty is the critical review of technology-based product and services strategies. It's been a problem getting the recruiter corps to wrap around my specialty, and I have to, by necessity, do my own marketing and outreach. Word of mouth, satisfied clients, and blog articles all help. I dwell on this because my latest madcap idea to re-focus brand monitoring as a decision support web hosted service for brand intermediaries toward the mid-market, and away from the brand owners, had stirred some ire in the industry.

"What do you know? What are your credentials? How did you come to this conclusion? What a conflagration.

Just because you put the word, 'analyst', after your name on a business card, does that make currency of your surmises and adjudications in themselves valuable? Of course not. Unless you carry the dubious distinction of working for the de facto pimps of the analyst industry - Gartner, Forrester, Giga, etc - you have to analyze and find the kernel of truth that is non-obvious, and oftentimes disruptive to the status quo and common beliefs  prevailing in the industry. Don't get me wrong, I use the word pimps advisedly and gingerly; while these august agencies turn out a lot of paid for whore crap, you can't beat their non-commissioned, self-sponsored reports and quantitative research that no lone-wolf analyst can match.

What do I know? Nothing special - I just try and call it as I see it. I have had a relatively undistinguished technology career with a few notable home runs. I write well, I express myself clearly, I can outline why I come to my conclusions and methods that led to those surmises and adjudications. I never graduated university, although I have one of the best interdisciplinary skill sets covering hardware and actual software systems and standards. This was all accidental, fate intervened.

What makes someone retain a bozo like me and say, 'study this sector, look at what we are doing, or are proposing to do, and make a critical review'. Moi? Yes, moi. If a client has internal technical leadership calling a product play, I can be a cheap insurance policy to get some critical perspective on the pitfalls, or a clear headed referee for the go-ahead. Since I am not in the management or review chain, and my engagement is closed ended, I am no threat and my advice has often been disregarded. That's my twinkle. I continue to get work because I more often than not catch a critical issue that was missed by those with an emotional or political attachment to a product or strategy or R&D path. It may be a mess when the client is in the midst of upheaval, but people go to other jobs and remember the good advice Wilensky  gave them back at old company X. The institutional investors and VC's have been good to me, too.

Such a long introduction to this article on text mining of the public corpora for brand monitoring! There is a good reason, believe me. I have stirred up a lot of bad sentiment (ugh), by putting out the notion that the early entrants to the brand monitoring industry have delivered a weak set of services (currently, at least, Matt), and are likely over reporting their ostensible campaign volume, and have missed the fat part of the market that needs them the most, i.e., the mid-market intermediaries. They have missed the opportunity like all who have come before them in myriad industry's because they followed rather than led in innovation, they saw brand owners as the low-hanging fruit because brand owners use roughly equivalent brand measurement services that are mirrored (not really) by the high-powered brand equity consulting industry.

As I have said repeatedly in my previous blog articles, and in my paid research for the previous EU telecommunications and internet client, there is no comparison between classical brand monitoring services and the new age early entrants of the text mining industry. Classical services by Arbitron and Gallup are far superior to text mining services for putting plans into action. Even Buzzmetrics, one of the true leaders of public corpus harvesting, is backed by ACN sector analysts for human perspective on what to do with collected data, how to conjoin with classical brand monitoring surveys, focus groups, etc.

Enough! Where, loud mouth Alan, did you ever get the idea for steering the industry towards multi-line distributors of the mid-market and retailer type brand intermediaries? Please! Well, I'll tell you. And by the way, if any of the CMO's and CEOs of the current crop of brand monitoring companies wants to keep going down the road they have chosen - no one is stopping them; there is no doubt that the cycle of CGM metrics services is still young, and that classical multi billion dollar agencies and new age textual harvesters will see a protracted period of consolidation.

Show me your code, dammit.....

Can you make it do this, can we give you sample text? Show me your code, you mutha....

I recently ran into this common response, as I do from time to time, in the course of meeting and writing to people about the work on advanced outcomes text mining and public corpus monitoring that grew out the work that me and my soon to be friend, Doc Martin, were performing at an EU telecom R&D lab.

As an analyst looking solely at the market dynamics and product strategies of the brand monitoring industry, I was a virgin, I knew nothing, I was coming in clean. Way over on the other side of the lab, was Charles Martin the outrageous, working on an unrelated machine learning project. It was pure chance that we started talking about the limitations of sentiment analysis, from both a market perspective (me) and machine processing and computational linguistic perspective (Charles). Two Jewish guys from good, East Coast and Mid-West stock, unrelated projects, working in an indifferent R&D environment that wouldn't know a hot topic if it fell in their pants.

Show me your code!

My job was to suss out the large industry issues from users perspectives - what would a good, sustainable, grow-able, web-based services look like in the brand monitoring world, 6 months, a year, five years?

I surveyed the users, the brand owners, several hundred who had partaken of the bounty that is today's state of the art in text mining and brand monitoring services. Talk about the corpus of the unimpressed! Still, these folks of the fortune 1000 brand owners, many of them visionaries, knew that this was a field of endeavor that needed to be cultivated.

It was an accidental left turn that led my research into the mid-market brand intermediaries that are the target of our product research. Very briefly, the mid-market is where decisions are made to add or drop product lines at the distributor or retail level. This is all covered in my other articles. The set of problems faced by the mid-market is completely different than the brand owners, who are the current target of sentiment scoring and brand monitoring; the market encompassed by these brand intermediaries is far larger and more fecund (from the POV of web based monitoring services) than the current brand monitoring sector could ever guess.

So, this complex web of issues regarding the scientific and strategic product issues that shall ultimately serve this mid-market, the true arbiters of commerce, is the starting point of our study - what do they want, what functional framework serves their needs to make decisions?

Show me your code.....does it do this?

In the world of what we might call, 'pre-product management', the analyst needs to be a bit more technical in order to understand the possible. We have here an entirely virgin decision support service territory that has been missed by the text mining industry - unless they are keeping their efforts secret.

The issues that are hinted at in my article are just the tip of the iceberg, and the merest crystallization of the larger body of work that has been done regarding the scientific underpinnings that need to be made, in a step by step way, practical, in......code!

But before that can happen, we need to move beyond the revelation that this very important market exists and is waiting, is not being served by the current industry leadership,  formalize the product functional issues, re investigate the tools issues, ratify the academic issues and establish alliances with the academicians that are working on advanced linguistics.

A grand edifice of a product architecture needs to be built on the sound foundation of understanding the sector. That's the kind of research that I am proposing, which will lead to functional test in about six months....or we shall find that the issues are vexing and that new tools are required to perform these complex extractions...or.....

We found the market, we have engaged with it from a product research perspective, we have divined the opening issues, we have covered the potential technical challenges that need further study, now we seek comity with a sponsoring organization.

This issue is too grand for vencap, it needs to be nurtured, not harvested.

Simplified UTCSPPO Schema

Here is a look at the external and simplified Universal Taxonomy of Customer Services and Product Performance Outcomes:

I am a terrible image editor.

What's Wrong with the Brand Monitoring Leaders?

Breaking it down to the bare bones:

1) All of the text mining leaders that cater to brand monitoring (not the BI or BAM guys), are, without exception, focused on sentiment scoring - the weakest of all metrics. Other than vendors like Buzzlogic, which takes an interventionist approach to marketing support via the 'influence' channel, sentiment only got a foothold because it is deployable via HSD's, hand scored dictionaries.

2) To understand why this is so, we must realize that these very early sector leaders specializing in Brand Monitoring of public corpora are all venture backed. This private equity binding imposes a 'time to market' condition. Therefore, the earliest ventures went with the best understood methods that seemed demonstrable. Other technologies for issue detection would have taken a longer development life cycle exceeding the 'time to harvest' most Series A rounds demand.

3) When one peels back the covers from sentiment analysis, it shows not only linguistic scoring weaknesses (even across large samples, although this helps), but it hardly provides the fine grained kind of qualitative analysis that would allow some type of steering or advisory when co-integrated with other variables - sales, stock levels, incentive program offers, etc.

4) Good words, bad words, neutral words - blah.....all of the HSD's used by the current 'leaders' (the term is used advisedly), are non-standard. Even test query sets run against the same data show non-repeatable results...the text scoring engines are not mature. Surprisingly, the Open Source tools are very robust (lingPipe for example.)

5) Compare this to the giants of brand monitoring, even for modest samples, and Arbitron, ACN, and Gallup always get repeatable results. The brand owners know this, and having tried some of the Buzzmetrics and Cymfony campaigns, few have opted for continuing campaigns. The returned data is just not compelling.

6) The TNS acquisition of Cymfony was a repudiation of the brand monitoring model, and the two rounds of private capital that Cymfony raised were barely covered by the sale. TNS is an advertising reporting service bureau, not a brand consultancy - it came from the opposite side of the spectrum. Cymfony could not find a buyer amongst the brand equity giants.

7)   Like lemmings, all of the sector entrants went towards this model of butting heads with the brand equity giants - creating a 'recurring campaign model', using long leads, non-reusable reporting dashboards, etc. Unsustainable.

8) The fat part of the market is in the intermediaries - the mid-market that acts as recipients of the brand decisions as they play out in the market. Retailers, distributors, small and medium multi line  durable goods purveyors.

9) These brand intermediaries were never approached by the text-mining sector entrants, because they could not be served with the type of technology that these companies had available, that is to say, sentiment scoring using non-standard dictionaries.

10) These mid-market intermediaries can be served by providing fine-grained guidance of the consumer's perception of product performance and interaction outcomes.  There are technologies that can provide this type of detection - eBay is rumored to be investigating modular dynamics to create a system to detect redress  issues.

11) The noise reduced (via statistical algorithms) and scored outcomes can be co-integrated with the retail program incentives (floor plan financing, coop advertising) and be placed within a 'decision support' framework.

12) A web-based, moderately-priced, service architecture, can be innovated with care. Such a system can generate many streams of revenue beyond subscription fees, for the use by mid-market intermediary distributors, retailers,. and someday.....consumers.

A Colloquial Treatment - Text Mining for Brand Monitoring

A Colloquial Treatment of the Product Performance and Outcomes Aspect of Mining of the Blogosphere for Brand Services Monitoring.

Alan Wilensky
[email protected]

The author’s recently posted monograph, “ Employing Advanced Natural Language Text Processing to Provide Guidance to Mid-Market Multiline Dealers and Product Distributors”, has generated a great deal of blog traffic, but some have asked for a more brief and colloquial treatment.

The following is a basic description of where the industry is, or has, led itself, and where the author thinks the industry should be going, based on research recently conducted for a telecom industry client. The resulting conclusions do not betray any verbatim strategic conclusions that the author provided to the client.

The Text Mining Industry, and in particular those specializing in brand monitoring services, have come to focus on ‘sentiment’ as the metric du jour. We all know the typical meaning of sentiment, it’s how we feel, or how we express how we feel. The problem occurs when we create machine scored metrics of a very human thing, such as sentiment, and expect the results that are mined from the blogosphere to make sense. Other than the linguistic problems of generation (That is soooo bad [in one generation] means bad, in another it means really great - Pimp, is (a derogatory) in one generation and quite amazingly, good in another [ we be each other’s pimp] (advocates), [pimp my ride] (make fancy)). One can find even more subtle examples of how linguistic subtleties could confound a computer. There are many more and robust social media metrics that far exceed the reliability of sentiment, or that can augment sentiment in order to strengthen the ultimate guidance that is being sought through the mining of the corpus in question, i.e., the blogosphere and public fora.

But, linguistic problems aside, it is the role that the early text mining sector entrants have cast themselves in as ‘brand monitoring surrogates’, that is really a point of contention. Who is concerned with monitoring brand? Why, it’s the brand owners of the Fortune 1000. These large companies, mostly in the durable goods sector (for who blogs about toothpaste and other consumer packaged goods?), have had unfettered access to the best brand monitoring and consulting practices. AC Neilsen, Arbitron, and Gallup are the giants of this industry, but there are others.