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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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!