JD Power’s Umbria is Mining Social Media & Blogosphere

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May 22, 2008 by James
Filed under: Internet Marketing, Strategic Content 

JD Power & AssociatesYesterday (May 21) I attended an invitation only conference at the Toronto Hunt Club about the importance and impact of the Internet on the automotive sector in North America.

Firstly I’d like to say thank you to Michael Pistol (publisher of TJAA) for inviting me, and secondly I’d like to share this rather interesting piece of social media news about what J.D Power & Associates are doing with all our online content:

JD Powers & Associates kicked off the conference with a fascinating presentation about the importance of social media and how it can be used by companies to better market their products and services. Not really groundbreaking news so far… until you realize that what they are using to achieve this herculean feat is something called Umbria.

“Umbria is a marketing intelligence company that analyzes social media—including blogs, message boards, Usenet, and product review sites. Umbria delivers not just data, but insights into brands, markets, consumers and trends.”

Here’s the official blurb about Umbria:

Umbria is unique in its ability to assess both what is being said, and who is doing the speaking in the online world. Umbria’s patent-pending technology enables the company to classify posts and estimate gender and age of the speaker, as well as rapidly identify and eliminate bogus spam posts. Umbria analyzes voices of the online community by using proprietary Natural Language Processing and machine learning algorithms to dissect the who, what and why of online opinion, offering in-depth insights for some of the world’s leading brands. For more information on Umbria, please visit www.umbrialistens.com

Oh yes, and don’t think this is just aggregated data - part of the presentation yesterday addressed this very question: YES, with Umbria they can drill down to the very words you said online.

So it turns out that Big Brother is really watching us after all.

About: J.D. Power and Associates is a global marketing information services firm operating in key business sectors including market research, forecasting, performance improvement, training and customer satisfaction.

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