We work from the core belief that tools need to be linked to people and processes in order to be effective. Tim Mohler

What is Text Analytics? Text analytics is the analysis of unstructured or semi-structured text to find things like: Common themes (what are people talking about?) Entities (people, places, things) Tone/sentiment (what do people think about what they are talking about?) Relationships between themes (when people talk about voice over IP, do they talk about cost savings or innovation?) The text to be analyzed can come from many different sources, such as: Search queries (what are people searching for?) Customer responses / customer satisfaction surveys (what are they happy or unhappy about? Are there correlations between specific problem areas and other variables?) Newsfeeds such as Moreover or Factiva (what is the press talking about? Is my company/product being mentioned?) Websites, blogs, discussion groups Free text analytics project for Cisco This project began as an effort to replace an existing clipping service with an in-house system that would be more flexible and cost-effective. It was extended to provide syndicated search on Cisco and competitor products, and grew eventually into a system that provides full-scale tracking of PR metrics such as number of mentions, tone of the coverage, analysis by technology area, analyst coverage, etc. It was clear from interviews with Cisco management that a primary need was flexibility. As Cisco moved into new markets and launched new products, PR and marketing managers needed to be able to change what was being tracked on a weekly basis. As breaking issues arose in the press, they needed to be able to track them and disseminate information throughout the organization. Cost was also an issue. Going to outside vendors became expensive when the questions being asked were changing so quickly. Simple processes like providing clippings were taking dollars away from higher-value projects such as tracking coverage of product launches. Using a combination of custom software, commercial data providers, and off-the-shelf text analytic software, Cisco can now track and analyze press coverage from 12,000 web sites, and can add new websites in 24 hours time. Having an in-house source of marketing and PR metrics gave Cisco the flexibility to track breaking issues as they arose, to go back and track issues after interest in it arose, to add new competitors on the fly, and to explore product launch coverage to track message penetration. The savings from the clipping service replacement alone was close to $100,000 per year. Syndication of search results across Cisco's internal websites provided new insight for PR and marketing managers into breaking news.

Specialties include Text analytics Web applications Web design Organizational Consulting