Unstructured Data: Text Data Mining: Content Analysis: Text Analytics Buzz

No matter whether you are an Analyst or the Head of the Company, you must have been very busy number crunching, deep-diving and analyzing the key reports generated. The more structured the information, the more significant it is. Still, most of the organization’s information is unstructured which may include Survey Questionnaires and Results, Contracts (essentially information stored in Content management systems).

Now, plenty of questions should arise in your mind: Is anything really significant stored in these systems? Is it worth to have a go at them? Will it be really insightful?

Study reveals that they are a treasure of company information and lots and lot of business insights could be derived from those data.

For e.g., if an Organization A into Apparels launches its new brand of outfits B, it would be very important for its Brand Managers to actually look into the positive/negative impression it creates in the minds of the Consumers.

So where to find the Voice of the Customer? It could be very well analyzed by conducting Surveys, Focus Group Studies etc. (Essentially Active Listening) .With the advent of Social Media sites, its pretty much inline for the new brand’s perceptions to get discussed in Twitter, Blogs and Chat rooms.

This is where the new concept of analyzing markets heading into?

The term called “Text Analytics”.

As the wiki mentions “The term text analytics describes a set of linguistic, statistical, and machine learning techniques that model and structure the information content of textual sources for business intelligence, exploratory data analysis, research, or investigation”.

Surveys conducted may have open-ended as well as close-ended answers. In case organizations structure their surveys (have close-ended answers), they can neither know of the actual Customer intent nor be surprised at any of the answers.

And being surprised is most important so that the brand strategy be exercised in ways that were not considered earlier.

Text analytics has been around the block a few times, but of late it's being applied to social media networking sites (Passive Listening). It can be a much robust and aggressive technique to analyze content in ways that can reveal patterns, sentiments and relationships in support of better and more timely business decisions.

For e.g. text analysts can access any public information sources including Web-based sources such as Twitter and Facebook, blogs, online marketing measurements, even competitors' Web sites.

Still its too early and nascent phase for Text Analytics due to most organizations stands to have structured data. But definitely it would come of age and predicting consumer perceptions would be really insightful.By industry, it is thriving in brand monitoring and financial services, and is being extended as a CRM and enterprise search solution.