Jun17 |
 I've been working with a fellow researcher for about the past three months perfecting a Relevancy metric. I've been thinking about a Relevancy metric for a while, it just took three months of study to finalize a math I'm comfortable with. Relevancy, Joseph? What do you mean by relevancy? Ah, good question that. I'm sure what I mean by it isn't what others mean by it. I mean, why should I start now?
The NextStage Relevancy metric measures "How relevant/important is this info to the visitor right now?" And one may rightly ask "How is relevancy relevant?" Ah...well now...
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Jun12 |
The iMedia Brand Summit has kept me a little busy, and I do keep my promises. One of the folks I asked about Sentiment Analysis prior to writing Sentiment Analysis, Anyone? (Part 1) was Stephane Hamel. I asked Stephane for a site I could analyze without my knowing anything about their strategy, demographics and such. Stephane suggested canoe.ca since it's a well known Canadian site that receives lots of traffic and has lots of diversified content.  The Canoe.ca site has an English and a French version so we analyzed the homepages of both versions to demonstrate the differences in cultural cuing. The homepages shown here are from 8 Jun 09 about 10:30amET. This image is the Canoe French homepage. Below is the English homepage. The information I'm sharing comes out of our tools, specifically the one I described in Sentiment Analysis, Anyone? (Part 1).  This image is the Canoe English homepage. I'll share at this point that the tool I'm using reads whatever digital information you give it exactly like a human of the intended culture would read it, provide it material in French and it thinks in French, provide it material in Gaelic and it thinks in Gaelic (we get a lot of calls for that, you betcha. The first language our technology understood was Gaelic because if you can do Gaelic you can do anything. Now we're teaching it Etruscan because you never know when you might want to sell sandals to a dead gladiator). What makes the tool different from the standard human is its ability to report on what will or would happen in the reader's mind at the non-conscious and conscious levels. Most people don't have that kind of training, our technology (Evolution Technology or "ET") does.
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Jun 5 |
We've been getting a lot of requests for Sentiment Analysis lately. Based on my fun ride regarding engagement, I decided to find out what Sentiment Analysis was before saying NextStage had been doing it for years, what's all the excitement about? So I went to Wikipedia and read "Sentiment analysis refers to a broad (definitionally challenged) area of..." "(definitionally challenged)"??? Ah. Yet another buzzword in a long list of "My gosh, what shall we call something else we can't really do?" words being slung about in the analytics world. Okay, fair enough. People selling the stuff are attempting to own the field by telling clients what it is, what it's suppose to be about and what they should expect. Some of you may know that Susan has a pharma background and that I often advise pharmas. They often say something like "We just discovered that this chemical compound has these effects. Can we come up with some catchy-named syndrome that this concoction will treat?" Same thing, really. "We know what we can do. Let's give it a name and see if we can sell it." But we are NextStage. We follow a different path. Asking "What do you want a Sentiment Analysis product to do?" I asked some people to tell me what they would like in a Sentiment Analysis product (thank you, Chris Berry and Stephane Hamel). I wrote Chris:
Howdy,
I'm wondering what, exactly, you folks would like a "sentiment analysis" tool to do.
Oh, the heck with that. Please give me a list of things you'd like some tool to do such that when you point some content at it, it tells you something about that content that would be valuable to you/your clients. Remember, you're talking to Joseph here. Go nuts with this. <Fair Warning Dept>
This is going to be a long, rambling post, folks.
...and I plan on having fun, too...
</Fair Warning Dept>
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May28 |
Continuing the promise made in Writings Elsewhere, my writing elsewhere for May '09 are: Enjoy. Please contact NextStage for information regarding presentations and trainings on this and other topics. Upcoming Conferences: Come on by and say hello. Sign up for the NextStage Irregular, our very irregular, definitely frequency-wise and probably topic-wise newsletter.
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May12 |
Lots of things to cover in this post. Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes abound. First, no sooner do I write in the last newsletter (if you didn't receive yours, email me) that I hope TheFutureOf blog will go in some new directions than my wish is answered. The blog is no more, no newer a direction could there be, yes? Makes me want to go back to studying PsychoPomp so that I might find it. I'll probably either place posts here that I was hoping to put there or start a new blog series devoted to what might be in the Future. Stay tuned. And I'm learning about Twitter. NPR did a piece, Keep Your Tweets To Yourself, today on Morning Edition that gave me a chuckle. I lost a follower today. She joined on Friday, I think. As I'm always curious who's interested in me (again, don't you folks have something better to do?) I clicked on her picture. And quickly called over Susan (beloved wife, partner, ...) who commented, "Are we going to have people throwing themselves at you at conferences, saying they want to have your children?" I doubt this will happen. Susan and I travel together now more often than not and have you heard the horse story yet? Anyway, I discovered I could do a search on @JosephCarrabis, NextStage, all sorts of things. Lots of 140 character discussions going on, questions and answer back and forths...none of them directed at me. Not that I know of, anyway. And people who know me know I won't intrude in the conversations of others unless invited. More interestingly, many of those twitterings that I discovered in my searches demonstrate stress responses along the Tend-Befriend axis. The most familiar of these axes is the Flight-Fight axis. The Tend-Befriend axis often demonstrates itself in female social interaction patterns. Ha, folks, bet you didn't know you were all thinking like women. In any case, I'll offer some responses here in (what I hope is) chronological order (LIFO)...
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May 5 |
Know More:
Age Based Marketing, AllBusiness.com Tie-In, Behavioral, Behavioral Analytics, Behavioral Marketing, Behavioral Targeting, Gender Based Marketing, Marketing, Marketing Analytics, Marketing Design, NextStageology, Online Identity
First thing, I'm on Twitter. It seems like a paranoid's dream, in a way. "Why are all these people following me?" I don't update it much. I mean, don't you folks have better things to do with your time? The title of this post, "Machine Detection of and Response to User Non-Conscious Thought Processes to Increase Usability, Experience and Satisfaction - Case Studies and Examples" is also the title of the whitepaper I mention in some recent twitterings and also demonstrate the power of in Why hasn't Marketing caught on as a "Science"? First thing to note: This paper is my attempt at a scientific paper about psycho-motor, -emotive, -cognitive, neuro-muscular, - cognitive and related displines demonstrating our identities -- the "who we think we are" -- during information exchanges ("when we're navigating a website"). This paper isn't for you if the words in the previous sentence are unfamiliar to you. Heck, this paper probably isn't for you even if you are familiar with those words.
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Apr28 |
Keeping the promise I made in Writings Elsewhere, my writing elsewhere for April '09 are: Enjoy. Please contact NextStage for information regarding presentations and trainings on this and other topics. Upcoming Conferences: Come on by and say hello. Sign up for the NextStage Irregular, our very irregular, definitely frequency-wise and probably topic-wise newsletter.
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Apr21 |
You know, I'm looking at the title of this post and knowing search engines will have convulsions over it. "Mistakecule"? Well, as much as I know about search engines (see links below) and with my propensity towards persnickitiness...  I'll be posting elsewhere about the great deal of math work I've been involved in as of late...basically the entirety of 1Q09. The problems I'm solving are varied and fascinating...particularly because they all relate to game theory and something called groupoids and both have to do with (among other things) market predictability, economics, social networking, wom, ...  It also has applications in more interesting things like winning games of solitaire and such. As a matter of fact, I suggested to some folks that they apply these rules (I'm getting to them, don't worry) to solitaire games because they demonstrate the rules so perfectly.  The rules (there are only two. I love it when things are obviously that simple) deal with removing -- or at least minimizing -- the probability of making mistakes. These rules won't remove mistakes (I'm still working on that one. Anybody familiar with Nevil Shute's "No, it wasn't an accident, I didn't say that. It was carefully planned, down to the tiniest mechanical and emotional detail. But it was a mistake." from On the Beach?) and the mistakes that are still makeable can still be grand ones.  The purpose of these rules is to tend towards 0 the likelihood that a mistake will be made. Let me give you some examples of what I'm talking about.
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Apr14 |
A received a joke over the weekend that made me laugh. Overtly, it's about politicians. Covertly (and perhaps to me and me alone) it's about marketing experts (remember, I'm not one). A cowboy named Bud was overseeing his herd in a remote mountainous pasture in California when suddenly a brand-new BMW advanced toward him out of a cloud of dust.
The driver, a young man in a Brioni suit, Gucci shoes, RayBan sunglasses and YSL tie, leaned out the window and asked the cowboy, "If I tell you exactly how many cows and calves you have in your herd, will you give me a calf?"
Bud looks at the man, obviously a yuppie, then looks at his peacefully grazing herd and calmly answers, "Sure, Why not?" The yuppie parks his car, whips out his Dell notebook computer, connects it to his Cingular RAZR V3 cell phone, and surfs to a NASA page on the Internet, where he calls up a GPS satellite to get an exact fix on his location which he then feeds to another NASA satellite that scans the area in an ultra-high-resolution photo.
The young man then opens the digital photo in Adobe Photoshop and exports it to an image processing facility in Hamburg , Germany .
Within seconds, he receives an email on his Palm Pilot that the image has been processed and the data stored. He then accesses an MS-SQL database through an ODBC connected Excel spreadsheet with email on his Blackberry and, after a few minutes, receives a response.
Finally, he prints out a full-color, 150-page report on his hi-tech, miniaturized HP LaserJet printer, turns to the cowboy and says, "You have exactly 1,586 cows and calves."
"That's right. Well, I guess you can take one of my calves," says Bud. He watches the young man select one of the animals and looks on with amusement as the young man stuffs it into the trunk of his car.
Then Bud says to the young man, "Hey, if I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my calf?" The young man thinks about it for a second and then says, "Okay, why not?" "You're a Congressman for the U.S. Government", says Bud.
"Wow! That's correct," says the yuppie, "but how did you guess that?" "No guessing required." answered the cowboy. "You showed up here even though nobody called you; you want to get paid for an answer I already knew, to a question I never asked. You used millions of dollars worth of equipment trying to show me how much smarter than me you are; and you don't know a thing about how working people make a living - or about cows, for that matter. This is a herd of sheep. .. Now give me back my dog. Please contact NextStage for information regarding presentations and trainings on this and other topics. Upcoming Conferences: Come on by and say hello. Sign up for the NextStage Irregular, our very irregular, definitely frequency-wise and probably topic-wise newsletter.
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Apr11 |
How many of you are familiar with Google's Latitude, a product that lets you keep track of where people are. What kind of metrics come out of this? I don't know, that's why I'm asking. I can tell you a lot about the psycho-cognitive and -emotional makeup of people who latitude themselves. One of my areas of research is predictive analytics. <AMPLIFICATION>
I probably don't use the term the way most others do. My usage comes from one of the think tanks I'm associated with. Predictive Analytics is the ability to take something and determine with a high degree of accuracy how well that something will do what it's suppose to do. This kind of predictive analytics is used everywhere from determining MTBF of helicopter rotors to how well marketing efforts will do in their target audiences.
Some people will hear its description and uses and think "trend analysis" and while I won't argue, I'd offer that predictive analytics is to trend analysis what saying "You can have any color you'd like in our portfolio" then showing them only black is.
Predictive Analytics is closely aligned to and sometimes confused with Persuasion Analytics. The latter, again with a high degree of accuracy, is where predictive analytics intersects with things like neuromathematics, neuroeconomics, neurothis-and-that.
</AMPLIFICATION> First blush from all this; people who latitude themselves are people who want you to know where they are at specific times. Well, Duh! It's also great for people who want to know where you are at specific times. Well, umm... The former isn't of any real interest. The latter, though. I know valuable domestic animals are radio-tagged so they can be quickly recovered if lost or stolen. I also know that there are transmitters small enough to be ingested without notice and powerful enough to be tracked from miles away. So parents wanting to know where their children are...that I can accept so long as no privacy issues are violated. Spouses uncertain of their partners... Yep, very curious to know what kind of metrics are going to show up from this. And I'll bet both predictive and persuasion analytics forms are going to be used bigtime. Please contact NextStage for information regarding presentations and trainings on this and other topics. Upcoming Conferences: Come on by and say hello. Sign up for the NextStage Irregular, our very irregular, definitely frequency-wise and probably topic-wise newsletter.
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