Author: Ajay Ohri

http://about.me/ajayohri

KXEN releases Social Network Analysis tool

KXEN, the automated model making software company added one more innovation by being one of the first major data mining and analytics vendors in releasing an analytics tool for Social Network Analysis

From the Press Release

Press release

San Francisco, Paris, London, March 24th, 2009

New Social Network Analysis Module Strengthens KXEN Automated Data Mining

Leverages connections between people to boost marketing campaign results and profitability

Sales, marketing and customer retention campaigns are set to become smarter, more effective and more profitable thanks to a new social network analysis module from data mining automation vendor KXEN. By exploiting the connections between customers of telcos, banks, retails and others, KXEN’s new KSN module has shown more than 15% lift improvement in campaign results.

KSN identifies the otherwise hidden links – call records or bank transfers for instance -between friends, families, co-workers and other communities and extracts significant social metrics, pinpointing who are the best connected and who plays the most important role in any group. In this way it reveals valuable new customer intelligence that – when added to existing customer information – can strengthen significantly user organizations’ customer acquisition, retention, cross-sell and up-sell campaigns.

Using KSN, companies can increase the accuracy and precision of their campaigns by leveraging the many more customer attributes that the module reveals, allowing them to better predict when customers may be about to churn to another provider, close an account, or buy a new product. A feature unique-to-KXEN allows the analysis of multiple networks and their evolution over time, exposing specific patterns of behaviors like rotational churn, fraud and identity theft.

"Traditional marketing relies on models based solely on customer-vendor interaction and assumes customers act independently of each other," says KXEN’s founder and CEO Roger Haddad. "But the new social network technology in KSN recognizes that customers do indeed interact with each other, and exploits that knowledge to drive up the effectiveness and completeness of marketing and sales campaigns."

KSN integrates with and enriches existing data mining environments or may be deployed entirely standalone. Exploiting viral marketing thinking, it eliminates the normally tedious and labor intensive aspects of social network analysis. The module provides as many social network maps as users want, recognizing that individuals may belong to many different networks across their business, family and social lives.

KSN, shipping from today, complements the existing KXEN Text Coder module which allows organizations to include plain text data into their analytics activities. Together the two modules, along with KXEN’s core software, are behind the company’s Data Fusion approach which combines structured and unstructured data from multiple sources to generate fast accurate results, thus maximizing organizations’ return on analytics investments.

Please click here to learn more about the KXEN Social Network Analysis module.

About KXEN

KXEN, The Data Mining Automation Company™ delivers next-generation Customer Lifecycle Analytics to enterprises that depend on analytics as a competitive advantage. KXEN’s Data Mining Automation Solution drives significant improvements in customer acquisition, retention, cross-sell and risk applications. Its solution integrates predictive analytics into strategic business processes, allowing customers to drive greater value into their business. Find out more by visiting www.kxen.com.

I found the statement by the CEO quite interesting –

 

"Traditional marketing relies on models based solely on customer-vendor interaction and assumes customers act independently of each other," says KXEN’s founder and CEO Roger Haddad. "But the new social network technology in KSN recognizes that customers do indeed interact with each other, and exploits that knowledge to drive up the effectiveness and completeness of marketing and sales campaigns."

 

I wonder if other analytics vendors are creating /releasing products like these.

Using Web 2.0 for Analytics 2.0

Here is a great video tutorial on You Tube by Zementis, creator of ADAPA,the cloud scoring engine for next gen predictive analytics. You can watch it on the URL or below-

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hNqxqrdXLI

 

A few weeks back, I was working with the ADAPA engine on a consulting gig, and Ron Ramos, the head of sales mentioned that though they have extensive documentation, they were planning a video tutorial as well on You Tube.

Beats a pdf everytime , doesn’t it !!!

I wonder why companies continue to spend huge and I mean huge amounts on white papers and PDF’s when they can have much better customer support using a bit of audio, video and even twitter support.

Surprisingly true even for companies working at the cutting edge with other technologies.And the essentially free availability of these tools.

 

I mean if companies can spend huge amounts for predictive solutions for the big big datasets , why cant they offer some solutions or apps for the web and social media- An exception is KXEN of course with a new Social Network Analysis Module here ).

Imagine a future –

( Example –

  • Hello SAS , My code wont run blah blah blah…

SAS Support on Twitter..okay do this

or

  • Hello SPSS, Where Can I find some stuff on Python because I got lost on the website
  • SPSS Support on Skype/Twitter- Dude , do this , click this link !

)

It is much better than endless rounds of email, aggravation and the list server method is well – the users should try and test www.twitter.com for user groups )

Featured Event : Using Web 2.0 for Sales 2X

How do you take the proven fundamentals of good selling and apply them to social networking? What Web 2.0 tools should you as a sales professional be utilizing to find new prospects and keep the customers you have loyal?

Sales executives are quickly discovering there is real business value in online connections. The Customer Collective, the online community for sales and marketing professionals, presents this free webcast to provide sales and marketing professionals with the knowledge they need to use social media to find and sell to new customers, as well as keep the ones they currently have close to home. Our expert panel will help you identify the new techniques and tools available to help you develop a Web 2.0 enabled sales strategy for 2009 and beyond.

Tune in to a live interactive discussion with a panel of sales experts, and get your questions answered. Don’t miss your chance to hear from:

Mark Woollen,Oracle
Christopher Carfi,Cerado Inc.
Anneke Seley,Phone Works

If you’re looking for ways to measurably increase your sales team’s effectiveness, don’t wait. Register now and:

Learn how social networks and Web 2.0 help sales professionals be more effective.
Become the trusted advisor your clients are looking for who ultimately wins the deal.
Discuss effective low cost/no cost methods you can put in place now.

See the results of our TCC survey, and learn how Web 2.0 enables salespeople to easily communicate with prospects, collaborate with other sales professionals, and garner relevant content.                                                                   

Social Selling: Live Q&A on Selling with Web 2.0

11 a.m. PST / 2 p.m. EST March 31, 2009    

Link to:       

http://www.thecustomercollective.com/client/tcc/8/?reference=tcc

(Ajay- I work as a contracting consultant with the SMT group as community evangelist and moderator for the Smart Data Collective , an online community of BI and Data Mining Professionals and for Social Media Today School – Which is a site to help aggregate tips ,tutorials and how to master Web 2.0 tools)

Analyzing Twitter

Among the mainstream trends I have seen emerging it seems Twitter is the flavor of 2009, just like LinkedIn was in 2006 ( and the new inbox makes it worse) and Facebook was in 2007-8.

Additional factors for the T’s success are (besides fatigue with existing buzz sites) it is the 3 rd most largest social network, has gazillions of dedicated passionate users and the new niche of using it both as marketing as well as a customer support tool.

Well how to analyze if you are making any grounds with Twitter.

Some Twitter Utilities that are useful to Bloggers are –

1) Twitme- http://www.phpvrouwen.nl/twitme/ 

WordPress Twitter Automatic Tweeter

2) Twitterfeed- http://twitterfeed.com/ 

Set up your RSS feed to customize the tweets and frequency of your blog posts.Also supports various URL shorteners ( see items 4-6)

3) Tweetop – For Top Tweeters in each sub section or domain  http://www.tweettop.com/

4) Tr.Im – This works the same was as URL shortening service except it tells you who read, re tweeted your twitter twit. http://tr.im/ (see below)

image

5) Ping.Fm – Pings you status to Twitter and Facebook and Linkedin . Then you say needed privacy.http://ping.fm

6) Twitalyzer http://twitalyzer.com/

This actually has custom Twitter Metrics like Signal to Noise , Generosity,Influence,Clout  (see below)

image

I need to spend more time on twitter it seems. What are your Twitter metrics and are using any of these to make your Twitter strategy easier ?

Chrome Experiments

Here are some nice data visualization methods elaborated in http://www.chromeexperiments.com/

 

I created one using Social Collider for searching @smartdataco and generated this data mapcoolied

The site  ( which goes by the tag of  Not your mother’s Javascript) is created by Google ,Creator of Chrome Browser.

 

In light of these deeply held beliefs, we created this site to showcase cool experiments for both JavaScript and web browsers.

These experiments were created by designers and programmers from around the world. Their work is making the web faster, more fun, and more open – the same spirit in which we built Google Chrome.

Here is an experiment called Canopy available at http://www.chromeexperiments.com/detail/canopy/

It generates Fractals

 

Another more useful experiment is Social Collider which enables you to search Twitter for specific words, and create a data map for that

SAS Global Conference 2009

The resources for SAS Global Conference are now online at

http://support.sas.com/resources/papers/proceedings09/TOC.html

The SAS Global Conference starts next week on March 22 till March 25 in Washington D.C.It is one of the oldest ,most renowned community conferences for any statistical software. Ever.

Here is a link to the SAS2009 Ballot Results in which users were polled on what features they like /dislike and want added to SAS Institute‘s suite of products and indeed to the SAS Language itself

 

http://support.sas.com/resources/papers/proceedings09/Ballot09.pdf

I really liked the blog as well the YouTube video here –http://blogs.sas.com/sgf/

 

Citation:

SAS Institute Inc. 2009. Proceedings of
the SAS® Global Forum 2009 Conference. Cary, NC: SAS Institute Inc.

Business Intelligence and The Heisenberg Principle

The Heisenberg Principle states that for certain things accuracy and certainty in knowing one quality ( say position of an atom) has to be a trade off with certainty of another quality (like momentum). I was drawn towards the application of this while in an email interaction with Edith Ohri , who is a leading data mining person in Israel and has her own customized GT solution.Edith said that it seems it is impossible to have data that is both accurate (data quality) and easy to view across organizations (data transparency). More often than not the metrics that we measure are the metrics we are forced to measure due to data adequacy and data quality issues.

Now there exists a tradeoff in the price of perfect information in managerial economics , but is it really true that the Business Intelligence we deploy is more often than not constrained by simple things like input data and historic database tables.And that more often than not Data quality is the critical constraint that determines speed and efficacy of deployment.

I personally find that much more of the time in database projects goes in data measurement,aggregation, massaging outliers, missing value assumptions than in the “high value” activities like insight generation and business issue resolution.

Is it really true ? Analysis is easy but the data which is tough ?

What do you think in terms of the uncertainty inherent in data quality and data transparency-