Trends and Outliers

Text Analytics Summit 2011 – A Twitter Recap

Last week, another event lit up the Twittersphere – the Text Analytics Summit #TAS11. This event sparked some interesting conversations around adding semantics and nontraditional data to the analytics mix plus over 300 Tweets.

You can see the data visualization here:

Presented by chairman Seth Grimes, the Text Analytics Summit is in its seventh year. Alongside Grimes, who is considered the leading analyst in the field of text analytics, presenters included a number of analysts, social media directors and VPs, CMOs, researchers and vendor representatives. You can see the entire speaker list at this link.

Highlights

Text analytics is a hot field. According to Grimes, the attendance for the Text Analytics Summit was up 30 percent from 2010. Additionally, he reports that it’s taking a $835 million share of the $11 billion BI market.

Seth Grimes kicked off the event with an overview of where we are with text analytics and where the industry is going. If you missed the summit, you can see his presentation slide deck here. Grimes also gave a more in-depth look at the text analytics market and solutions in a workshop format at #TAS11. You can find all 79 of the presentation slides here.

Grimes is known for his witty Twitter commentary, and he doesn’t disappoint with this event’s best Twitter quote:

Seth Grimes: “Text analytics is like a dancing bear. You don’t care how good it is, you’re just amazed it works at all.” (approx) @Kurtis_Williams #TAS11

A couple more related to Grimes:

• John Blossom: “Emotional, ethnicity and cultural clues being harvested from speech analytics - @SethGrimes #tas11 More Second Web #tech.”
• Seth Grimes: ”@TomHCAnderson Sentiment/semantic is an artificial, idiosyncratic distinction that seems meant to create market differentiation. #TAS11.”

Chris Jones, senior manager of text analytics at Zynga (the company behind social games such as Farmville and Mafia Wars) received many Twitter accolades on his presentation: How to Operationalize the Voice of the Customer in Your Company.

Some of the best Tweets:

• Nicole Laskowski: “Chris Jones (Zynga): Text analytics can distance you from customers. Don’t forget to meet, talk to, shake hands with customers. #tas11.”
• Lee Feigenbaum (VP of Technology Services at Cambridge Semantics): “Chris Jones (Zynga) — link it together — text analytics data + other enterprise information #tas11 #semanticweb.”
• Tom H.C. Anderson (CEO of Anderson Analytics) : “Zynga talking about Farmville “There are 2 million farms in US. We have 30 million farmers on Facebook” #TAS11 #NGMR.”

A view of the experts. Topsy.com gives you the ability to search the hashtag #TAS11 and return all the Web resources related to the event. You can sort by Web, Blogs, Tweets and Experts. Here’s an experts list related to the Text Analytics Summit.

The Twitter Leader Board

1. Seth Grimes – Grimes Tweeted more than anyone else by more than 6 percent. His Tweets accounted for more than 16 percent of the event’s Twitter Traffic.
2. Jon Blossom – president of Shore Communications – a research firm specializing in marketing content and technology. Blossom accounted for just over 10 percent of the Tweet volume.
3. Samir Batla – principal product manager at EMC Consulting. He Tweeted just under 10 percent of the Tweets. He also appeared on the Spotfire blog recently to discuss putting content in context.
4. Shantanu Godbole – a researcher at IBM in New Delhi, India. He provided just under 8 percent of the real-time updates on TAS11.  He also wins best Twitter handle with @solzaire.
5. Nicole Laskowski & Deborah Balme. Laskowski is the new editor for business analytics and BI at TechTarget. She tied with Balme, associate director at OgilvyOne (advertising) specializing in analytical and data solutions. Both Tweeted just over 5 percent of the total TAS11 updates, respectively.

Here’s a convenient “Follow the Experts” list for you:

@SethGrimes
@TomHCAnderson
@LeeFeigenbaum
@Kurtis_Williams
@jblossom
@sabatla
@solzaire
@TT_nicole
@dbalme

Subscribe to the Trends & Outliers Blog for more insights on text analytics and what’s happening in the Twittersphere.

Amanda Brandon
Spotfire Blogging Team

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