Tom H. C. Anderson - Next Gen Market Research

Today just posting a few updates related to upcoming/recent social media and text analytics events.

New York Technology Council - Expert Panel

On July 21st, 6 - 8pm on 46th & Park I will be participating in a panel on social-media analytics, sentiment and text mining. There will be a short presentation before the panel after which the panel will take up “Analyze and Optimize Your Social Media Presence”. I will be representing the marketing research perspective, and will be joined by Stephanie Noble and Seth Grimes who will also lead the panel. After the 45-minute panel, there’ll be 30 minutes of Q&A.

If you’re in NYC or the tri-state area and interested in social media and text analytics please come by. Info to be posted soon on http://nytech.org.

Text Analytics, Social Media and Qualitative Research - Interview

Derek Sawchuk of Itracks asked me a few questions about text analytics and qualitative last week on behalf of GOMC (The Global Online Moderator Community). He asked me some interesting questions on whether i thought social media and text analytics was more suitable for quantitative or qualitative research.

You can access the interview here on the GOMC blog.

Screen/Web-Scarping Seminar - Summary

Andreas Nilsson of Norstat was good enough to put together an excellent summary of the screen scraping and text mining presentation I gave at SÖK (Sveriges Marknadsundersökare) a week ago in Stockholm. The summary is available here (in Swedish).

Perhaps one of the main takeaways though is that while there are a host of different text analytics software choices ranging from enterprise providers like Attensity and Clarabridge to more specific providers like SAS, SPSS and Temis (not to mention some very low cost or free academic software), it’s not at all so much about the software you use. The software is just a tool in the tool box. It’s knowing exactly what tool or combinations of tools to use, when and how (the methodological considerations) that really matters.

In regard to sentiment accuracy and text analytics vs. human coding, again using the tool example, text analytics is like a nail gun or power saw vs. a traditional hammer or hand saw. Both will continue to be needed well into the future. But who would think about building a house without a power saw today?”

@TomHCAnderson