This blog is turning into a cheese sandwich.

Hat tip to @redeye for the analogy; he asked the question, “when is a blog not a blog?”, and came back with the answer (or someone else did), “if you have a blog and don’t update it – it is not a blog. It’s a cheese sandwich.”  By that definition, this blog will turn into a cheese sandwich over the coing weekend.

Why? It’s not because I am going to give up on trying to bore the pants off you.  It’s because I am going to migrate our three websites from static HTML to a WordPress install.  That means that all three websites will have blogs on them.  So, as of next week, social media posts will be found on the blog on the social media website; text analysis and data mining posts will be found on that website; and market research and business posts will be found on the original and central website. 

As a result, this blog will become a cheese sandwich.

Bristol Knowledge Cafe – Generosity.

Last night I attended the Bristol Knowledge Cafe, curated and hosted by Ed Mitchell, at the Pervasive Media Studio, the first time I have attended one of these events (though I have wanted to for a long time).

Steve Bridger started things off with a short talk on the subject of Generosity, after which the sixteen people divided into three groups to discuss the subject.  Our discussions centred onthe why and the what of generosity, and covered such issues as contributing to open source software, whether people working in charities are more generous than people working in business, and the “Tragedy of the Commons”. 

After about half an hour, all of us got into a big circle and the discussions continued, drawing in the thoughts of all three groups into one conversation.  Though no conclusions could be drawn, everyone had their say and the discussions certainly made me think about a lot of issues – personal, social, political.

The very simple format of the Knowledge Cafe allows a large(ish) group of people to all have their say in discussing a topic.  This is one version of Open Space, a technique used by my collaborator and friend Jack Martin Leith, which I am keen to use in conjunction with our new KatugasLex service: the idea being that on larger projects covering an enterprise, actions as a result of the analyses would be discussed and decided on by representatives of the client in some form of Open Space.

KatugasLex Text Analysis Service.

Having (I think) successfully launched the KatugaSM2 social media monitoring service to the PR community of the South West of England – more details on that later – I will be concentrating on the KatugasLex text analysis service this week, and generating the funding to be able to develop all of these services properly.  On Friday I met with people from Sturgess van Damme, who may be able to put me in touch with the kind of lawyers who might be interested in this service, which is really exciting. 

As a result, later today I will be sending out a press release anouncing the launch of the service – watch this space!  I hope to be able to get a case study up on the website, and am following up on a number of other leads to try and get the ball rolling with this service.

KatugasLex and KatugaSM2 go Live.

Katugas hosted drinks for key friends, supporters, and collaborators at eoffice on Friday, 23rd January, to mark the launch of our new services, KatugasLex and KatugaSM2.  Many thanks to all who attended.

Katugas New Services Launch Drinks, 23rd January 2009.

In this picture: John Bradford, Amy, Lorraine Legg, Chris Legg, Kampamba Chomba Legg.

Katugas New Services Launch Drinks, 23rd January 2009.

In this picture: Wouter de Goede, Sam Downie, Jack Martin Leith, Takeshi Kihara, Harriet Williams, John Bradford, Amy.

Now that the websites are live, the next thing to do is sort out mailshots and get the business going.  We are all very excited about the potential of these new services, and we’re looking forward to working on them.

New Services, New Websites, New Staff.

New Staff?  The last thing I hoped for when I set up my business by accident was that I would be taking on staff – but that’s what I have done. On monday, Takeshi joined me, part time to start with, to take over the day to day management of the market research coding projects we work on.

What do I mean, set up my business by accident? Well, in September 2006 I was diagnosed with a non-Hodgekins, Burkett-type Lymphoma, and was in and out of hospital until the beginning of May 2007. Millie and I moved to Bristol, to stay with my parents, but we were broke and I was still in a wheelchair, so it was difficult to go to work.  However, I had a laptop and connection to the internet, so I started to email people, and gradually the work came in.  In August someone refused to give me work unless I gave them my company registration number, so I formed the company; in September someone else refused unless I gave them my VAT number – so I registered.

And now – Takeshi has joined Katugas.  This means I have the time to do other stuff – fun stuff, and I have used the time to finalise my plans for setting up two new services.

The first I am calling KatugaSM2, a social media monitoring service (holding page at www.katugaSM2.co.uk). We will be using the Radian6 monitoring system, to provide our clients with daily updates on the buzz around their brand, and weekly, monthly, and quarterly analysis of trends.

The second service is KatugasLex, a text analysis services (holding page at www.katugasLex.co.uk ).  For this we will use the Leximancer text analysis system, and you can see sample output from it here. By one estimate, corporations only use 20% of the data they hold; this service will allow them to re-visit data they hold in text, and use it for decision making.

We have high hopes for these projects; if you are interested in any of the services Katugas offer, please contact me.

Text Analysis – Gordon’s thoughts

Yesterday, Barack Obama was inaugurated as the 44th President of the United States.  He gave a great speech, which I watched on the big screen in our office here in Bristol.  Chris Westfall, from Leximancer and The Customer Insight Portal, posted Obama’s “thought bubbles” on his blog (here) soon after.  This made me think about other potential uses of Leximancer, and I have produced a similar analysis of Gordon Brown’s first speech to the Labour Party Conference as Prime Minister, in 2007. 

Gordon's Thought Bubbles: Conference, 2007.

Concepts in Gordon's speech to Conference, 2007

Further analysis coming soon…..

Leximancer: a business or a hobby?

Over the past few weeks I have been investigating the possibility of setting up a text analysis business using Leximancer.  Below are some brief notes I made over the weekend as the start of marketing materials for this service: 

Many Companies and organisations hold vast amounts of text and other data about their stakeholders; further information regarding perceptions of the organisation can be found in social media on the internet, and in customer satisfaction and other market research.  In order to define a solid strategy for the business, it is essential that the data from all these sources be combined in some way and presented to the decision makers.

 

Text: Libraries, minutes, email, etc.

An analysis of the text held by the organisation, whether in internal reports, minutes or notes from meetings, or email discussions, should be the first step in defining the knowledge base of the company.  This could be done using Leximancer or a similar system, and could show up potential innovations which were overlooked at the time for whatever reason, or define trends in the thinking of the company.  For some organisations, such as law firms working on class action suits or police forces working on large investigations, where a large number of depositions or statements are held for a single incident, Leximancer could be used to draw out the common threads in multiple texts, and aid in the understanding of the information held.  Katugas Research Services will develop a service to aid organisations of all sizes to understand the information they hold in text.

I’m quite confident that there will be some interest in this service, but I’m not sure whether it will become a major revenue stream, or more like a hobby that pays for itself.  The problem is that the monthly pricing model means that I will have to get a paying project every month to cover the subscription and other costs.

Having said that, this could be the killer app, the side project that takes me to the next level.  Given current economic conditions, the general down turn in marketing budgets, and the downturn in advertising spend, I think that this is a risk worth taking, and so I will be properly setting up KatugasLEX later this week, and offering text analysis as a service from next week.  Wish me luck?

Are Customer Satisfaction Surveys Enough?

“Traditionally”, companies track what there customers think of them through regular (usually monthly or quarterly, sometimes weekly) customer satisfaction surveys, carried out either on the internet or by telephone. These are expensive to carry out, and capture a snapshot, the attitudes of the customer base at a moment in time.

With the advent of  social media, public discussions of brands and companies have spread from the traditional media – newspapers, radio, and TV – where they are controlled, mediated, and carried out by professional “expert” reviewers, out onto the web, where they carry on in discussion forums, blogs, social networking sites, and all the many places that allow us to comment on what we see or read.

These “social media” comments appear un-edited and unmediated; the brand or company has no way of controlling what is being said.  I believe theis to be a double edged sword  – spontaneous praise is a wonderful thing on which you can build a stronger reputation, though spontaneous rage can be highly damaging – remember the adage that a satisfied customer will tell three people, while a dissatisfied one will tell ten; also remember that bad news tends to travel faster than good news.

So, there is your company, quietly going on with your customer satisfaction research that you have been doing every month for the last ten years; is that enough?  I would say not, because the ways and the places in which the consumer is talking about you and your brand have become more permanent and moved to the “social media” space.  I believe, therefore, that it is necessary to augment the hard quantitative research of satisfaction surveys with more frequent dips into the social media pool.  This will allow you to find out what people have said about you within days, and allow you, if necessary, to take action.

With this in mind, Katugas Research Services are currently putting together a text analysis service, to analyse what is being said on various websites.  We are also looking for launch or pilot customers for this service – if you are interested, please get in touch by email at sales@katugas-research-services.co.uk.

Core Business and Side Projects.

As regular readers will know, my company, Katugas Research Services, has a simple, single core business: the categorisation of verbatim responses from market research surveys.  Over the last few months, I have been involved in a couple of side projects, in an informal way, and today one of them went live. 

Good-Baad is, simply, a voting site, where you vote on a topic – which could be a person, a category (say pizza) or a brand (say Pizza Express).  Each user only gets one vote – though they can change it as often as they like. You can only vote in one of two ways – good or bad.  So far my man Joel has done all the work – coming up with the concept, doing all the development – and my involvement has solely been to suggest revisions and to look at ways in which the concept could be monetised.  So now it is out there – please take a look and let me know what you think!

I have a couple of other side-projects slowly maturing in the cellar, but all will be revealed in due time.

Insight Lost in Verbatims

“The Insight is in the Verbatims”

Having worked solely with verbatims over the past year, I have come to believe that the true insight from a quantitative survey is in the verbatim comments. Why is this?

A quantitative survey has basically two types of question – the precoded and the open-ended (to me, Lieckert scales are a variety of precoded question). In the precoded questions, the range of possible answers are defined before anyone is interviewed – and therefore is known prior to the start of the survey. Open-ends, on the other hand, are for the unknown unknowns – you know only that your target sample for your survey will have an opinion on the matter, but not what that opinion will be.  And this is what I mean by the insight being in the verbatims – without them, you wouldn’t know if a new, previously unconsidered factor, was affecting decision making.

Management of Verbatims.

This leads on to the importance of proper coding at all stages of a project.  If you are going to get the full value and insight from the verbatims collected in a project, you need to be clear with how you will deal with them (and make sure you have the budget). Code-frames must be flexible; they should be allowed to change, wave by wave if necessary, in order to reflect the changing perceptions of the sample being surveyed. If code frames are set, and not allowed to change, you are in effect wasting your time collecting verbatim data; you might as well, after the first wave, set the question up as a pre-coded question, and save time (and money) – because opinions and attitudes will change over time – that is the whole point of doing tracking studies. 

If you are doing a large study, with potentially thousands of verbatim answers, think about what you are going to do with the verbatims before you start: are you going to read them all, or are you going to code them, or are you going to analyse them in some other way?  How much will that cost, and how long will it take?  Is it worth it to you, and to your client? 

If you do not have the time or the budget to code the verbatims, or are not prepared to allow the code frame to be flexible, you should ask yourself whether they are necessary before fielding the study; answering verbatims, whether on the telephone or on the web, lengthens the interview, and adds to both drop out rates and the cost of carrying out the survey.  If the verbatims are then not going to be used properly (and the valuable insight they contain is going to be lost), you might as well not collect the in the first place.

 

Having written this post, I just read through it and it seems a bit… didactic.  I didn’t mean it to be. We, at Katugas, like to provide a good and flexible coding service to our clients, but when we see valuable insight being thrown away, we get upset. 

Please think about your verbatims!