How Sentiment Analysis can Make Sense of Social Media (or Can it?)

Ever since we realized that we needed more than mere transactional CRM data to get to know our customers and deliver on the mythical 360-degree view of them, we focused on two areas: what customers want (psychographics) and what customers feel (emotions and sentiments).

We spent the past 7-8 years figuring out direct and indirect feedback methods to try to understand what customers want and need using Enterprise Feedback Management and Surveys. We even went as far as to adopt and implement social media to capture the un-structured feedback that was latent in those interactions.

What we discovered along the way was that Social Media and unstructured feedback can be used to analyze sentiments and feelings, as customers are less controlled of their emotions when interacting in a social environment. We tried to understand the true sentiments behind the feedback and how we can use it for achieve our goals.

Alas, have we figured out how to use it and understand it? Can we really understand and use customers sentiments as metrics? What happens when we analyze for sentiments and not data? These are some of the questions we will aim to answer in this panel including:

· What is sentiment analysis?

· Does it work?

· What are the known problems?

· What are the know results?

· Should I implement it?

· What should I expect after implementation?

· What is the maintenance like?

· Is sentiment analysis for real?

· What are vendors doing about it?

Panelists:

Franco Salvetti holds a position as Senior SDE Manager of the Reference Vertical Answer team at Microsoft Bing Search (previously Natural Language Scientist at Powerset, Inc. now acquired by Microsoft) with responsibility on the scientific aspects related to Web Search Technologies (e.g., Factz and Instant Answers), and Human-Computer Interaction. Previously as a research scientist at Umbria Inc. (acquaried by J.D. Power) he worked on projects involving Information Extraction, Sentiment Analysis, Text Analysis and Graph Theory. Prior to this, he worked for Google in the area of Relation Extraction, IBM Research on a project about Social Network Analysis, Bioserve Space Technology and various start-up companies in Italy.

Jochen Frey is the CTO for Scout Labs and brings significant technical leadership and experience in scalable systems development and natural language processing to the organization. As CTO of Meaningful Machines for 5 years, Frey managed a combined onshore/offshore research and development team and deployed over $1mil in hardware to launch the world’s highest quality machine translation system (Spanish to English, with high quality prototypes for other languages including Arabic and French). He architected and oversaw implementation of high performance, failure tolerant message passing infrastructure and developed a high-speed 200GB distributed full text index. Prior to Meaningful Machines, Frey was the Director of Technology for the Eastern Region at Razorfish (previously iCube), architecting and overseeing numerous large-scale systems implementations. His past experience also includes software engineering for the US Navy and software design of risk management tools for Dresdner Bank in Frankfurt, Germany. Frey has his MS / Diplom Ingenieur in Computer Science and Medicine from the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg.

David Bean, PhD, Chief Technology Officer, Semantic Technologies, Attensity
In his role as CTO David is focused on the development of technologies that better manage and deliver superior natural language processing applications. David is the author/recipient of six patents and has over sixteen pending software patents. He is an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the University of Utah's Linguistics Department, where he teaches applied computational linguistics. David is a sought-after guest lecturer to a wide range of commercial and academic groups. He is also passionate about lecturing at the elementary school level to introduce young minds to astronomy, physics and other cool science things. Prior to Attensity, David was an IS director and an independent consultant in the healthcare industry.

Esteban Kolsky is the Founder and Principal of ThinkJar LLC, a research and consulting organization focused on multi-channel Experience Management. He currently helps clients determine how to design, implement, and manage better experiences for communities and customers across all channels, including the new media and social channels. He also conducts research on SCRM and Communiities, which is distributed through his blog “CRM Intelligence and Strategies”.
Esteban has over 22 years of experience in the Customer Service and CRM space, spending more than ten of those years working as a consultant and advisor to some of the largest global organizations on their strategies for Customer Service, CRM and Experience Management. He also spent eight years at Gartner as an analyst writing about the future of CRM and CEM, including coining the concepts for Enterprise Feedback Management and Collaborative Customer Service, two of the hottest trends in social media.

Gourmet dinner and wine are included!

$20 in advance; $30 at the door

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Special Thank You to our sponsors:

Lithium (https://www.lithium.com/)Lithium provides the leading Social CRM solutions required for building successful enterprise communities on-demand, including proven forums, blogs, ideas, and a Social CRM platform. And when you work with us as a client, partner, community member, or as part of the Lithium team, your participation will most definitely influence the direction of how enterprises around the world will empower their customers with successful online communities along with connectivity to CRM systems and the Social Web. That's right now and in the future.

Radian6 (https://www.radian6.com/)Founded in 2006, Radian6 was created with the idea that companies need to be listening to the social web in order to effectively participate. Intelligence about online conversations is critical: companies need to know what’s being said about their brand, industry, and competitors online. So, we built a listening platform designed to help companies do just that.
But listening is just the beginning. Businesses need to measure. Analyze. Report on their social media efforts. And they need the tools to engage with their communities online. Radian6 provides the ability to do it all, and to scale it across all the areas that social media ought to touch: customer service, sales, public relations, marketing, management.

Attensity (https://www.attensity.com/)Attensity delivers the power of sophisticated data and semantic analytics in the form of easy-to-use business applications, allowing business leaders, customer support personnel and customers to get relevant and actionable answers fast. Attensity applications use analytic engines to access both structured and unstructured data from various sources, find relevant and accurate information in response to queries and present the resulting insights in a way that supports accurate and timely decision-making.
Contact me (https://tkanzaveli@gmail.com) about sponsorship opportunities.