Tom H. C. Anderson - More Than Market Research

Today’s Reason - Fighting CGM (Brand Terrorism)

I’ve been working a lot lately on SNS (social network) analysis and also of course on CGM (consumer generated media) analysis using text mining techniques.

I usually tell our clients that they should be thinking not about where to use text analytics, but rather the question should be where not to use text analytics. Still when someone hears ‘text analytics’ or ‘text mining’ they seem to think about screen/web scraping, and therefore we’ve been doing more and more of that lately.

Interestingly, while this is the area of growing interest I also frequently get asked “what type of consumer insights information is available on the web?” and “why should we be doing it?”. Of course the answers to these questions are many ranging from competitive intelligence to customer service.

So I thought from time to time I will give examples of interesting insights and/or reasons for conducting web/screen scraping projects. Since I’ve been traveling and staying in hotels quite a bit this month I thought of a pr/customer service management example first. This is actually an example which I first became aware of in 2001! It’s an hilarious example of what can happen due to CGM and illustrates the importance of using text mining to stay abreast of CGM and managing your brand.

To understand what happened in 2001 to Hilton’s Doubletree brand just take a look at this brief and funny PowerPoint presentation (you may want to save it as it is getting harder and harder to track down). This presentation was more widely distributed than probably any other powerpoint presentation in history. This was in 2001, and it is still around being talked about on the web! Had Hilton identified it sooner, a lot of brand damage could have been prevented. You may want to save the PPT as it is getting a bit harder to track down these days:

http://www.snopes2.com/business/info/badhotel/frame.htm
nancy-rapoport.com/Documents/YoursIsAVeryBadHotel.ppt

Interestingly the property now belongs to Starwood and is a Four Points by Sheraton. I’m pretty sure that’s not ‘Mike’ in the picture I found on spg.com:

 
-Tom