The Why of content analytics is clear: Quantify text and other "unstructured" sources and you can improve content delivery and findability, optimize storage, facilitate reuse, and extract business information. Why is easy; How is more complicated. A variety of semantic and analytical technologies come into play although different approaches best suit different business challenges, information types, and analysis styles.

We will explore the Why and How of content analytics at next week's Smart Content conference. Whether or not you can attend, five articles I've recently published will help you come up to speed. They're accessible -- not technical -- Five Easy Pieces if you will, with a great deal of richness, to be explored, beneath their surfaces.

Check out --

• Content Management Finds Meaning
• This is Content Intelligence, According to 4 Experts
• Content strategy by the numbers, via semantics
• Six Definitions of Smart Content
• Semantics and Analytics Unlock Value in Social and Online Content

We'll hear more about success stories in diverse business domains at the conference; we'll explore all things content analytics. But even if you can't join us, key a watch on the topic. "Unstructured" content, from online, social, and enterprise sources, is a next big thing for BI and content management both as boundaries expand to create a world of semantically unified business information.

Facebook, LinkedIn, Trip Advisor, and Twitter -- social media -- are almost incidental, replaceable tomorrow if another platform proves more attractive, powerful, and agile. (Think AOL and MySpace.) It's content that is king, the message delivered via the blog/e-mail/news/forum medium, generated by corporations and individual producers, traveling a two-way street between them and information-consumer audiences, who in turn comment, repost, and remix at will. And it's Smart Content, the focus of a conference I'm organizing, that allows producers and consumers alike to find the greatest profit, however measured, in online and enterprise content.

The information governance concept, beloved by corporations and consultants, barely applies. It's a challenge creating standards and maintaining content-production rules, more a drag than a benefit, given the highly competitive, fast changing, almost chaotic content marketplace. It's semantic and analytical technologies, which help you find and exploit patterns relevant to your goals, whether expanding readership or automating sense-making, that allow content producers and consumers to keep up, to create findable, flexible, and reusable content and to generate business-linked insights.

Smart Content, the conference, is really just a next step in the BI/analytics/applications market education and match-making I've been doing for years. The opportunity is huge -- business and technical -- a consequence of the value content analytics can bring to news and social media and Web and enterprise content.

We'll cover a spectrum of approaches -- as applied in media & publishing, advertising & on-line commerce, marketing and PR, finance, research, and the Semantic Web -- enhancing the value of news and social media and Web and enterprise content -- with links to enterprise information management, content strategy, BI, text analytics, and search.

We'll start with Visionaries Panel with Dries Buytaert, CTO at Acquia and creator of Drupal, Natasha Fogel, EVP at Edelman StrategyOne, and Mark Stefik from XEROX PARC, followed by Jeff Fried of Microsoft explaining What Business Innovators Need to Know about Content Analytics.

We'll have talks by Rachel Lovinger, content strategy lead at Razorfish, Darrell W. Gunter, EVP/CMO at Collexis, and Randall Snare & Elizabeth McGuane of iQ Content, Dublin -- preceded by a series of lightning talks that will help attendees learn about the gamut of innovative smart-content solutions -- and followed by five Application Spotlight talks. Then stick around for a networking reception.

Smart Content will take place Tuesday, October 19 at the Executive Conference Center at 48th & Broadway in Manhattan. Learn more, and register today, at smartcontentconference.com. Register by September 10 for a $200 early-bird discount.

As my colleague Laurel Earhart, Smart Content marketing director, puts it, Smart Content is designed for decision makers, implementers, solution providers, and also investors. We're expecting great things to happen!

Lastly, I'm quite happy and appreciative to have TechTarget and the BeyeNETWORK as a Smart Content media sponsor, and the support of other prominent media and solution providers in the content management and analytics space. I'd love to have TechTarget readers and community members join us for what is sure to be an excellent program, due of course to the quality and expertise of the Smart Content speakers.

Please visit smartcontentconference.com for more information and to register. (Early-bird rates run through September 10.) Thanks!

Just a final note about the Sentiment Analysis Symposium, April 13 in New York. The symposium is a business-focused conference designed to educate users -- current and prospective -- on sentiment solutions for social media, public relations, customer experience, financial markets, and other applications.

I hope you can attend. We have a great program lined up. I'm especially looking forward to the lightning talks, a series of quick demo-presentations, and to "Selecting a Social Media Analysis Platform/Provider" with moderator Suresh Vittal from Forrester Research and social-analytics gurus Nathan Gilliatt and Marshall Sponder. Note that registration is 50% off for academics, government, and non-profits.

And this is a first note about this year's Text Analytics Summit, slated for May 25-26 in Boston. I'm program chair once again and will present an introductory workshop the afternoon of May 24. Please consider joining us!

Do get in touch about the conferences or anything else related to BI, text analytics, or sentiment analysis -- my coordinates are on-line -- or follow me on Twitter for updates.

Seth

IN-DEPTH: Alta Plana's Seth Grimes on how text analytics is expected to shape up in 2010
 
No single solution provider dominates text analytics. According to Seth Grimes, president, Alta Plana, no single provider dominates any significant text-analytics market segment.
 
"This is good news for current and prospective users," recently wrote Grimes, industry expert and Conference Chair at the upcoming 6th Annual Text Analytics Summit. 
 
In order to know more about the latest trends and issues, Text Analytics News' Ritesh Gupta recently spoke to Grimes. Excerpts: 
 
Publishers, media portals, social-network and forum sites: they all realise that intelligent content tagging and conceptual search and semantic integration -- capabilities supported by text analytics and related semantic technologies -- are key to information findability, to a rich and satisfying user experience.  Last year, you told me the use of these technologies is on a fast track, a major growth area for text analytics and semantics. How do you assess the situation as of today?
 
Seth Grimes: There's strong uptake on the publishing side, where organisations seek to make their information more findable and usable (and profitable), and even stronger uptake on the consumer side, where organisations analyse and integrate content-extracted information for a gamut of business needs.
 
One of the most interesting developments on the publishing side is the emergence of a wide range of APIs, application programming interfaces, that allow functions such as tagging, topic classification, and content enrichment (with semantically associated information) to be included in publishing processes. 
 
And on the information-consumption side, yes, there's semantic search and also semantically supported content integration that allows real-time information aggregation, essentially information aggregation and analysis dashboards that range from "listening platforms" to interfaces for BI-style analyses of text-sourced data.

... continued at http://social.textanalyticsnews.com/news/examining-big-questions-facing-text-analytics-industry

For a forthcoming BeyeNETWORK article, Perspectives on Text Analytics in 2010, I asked solution-provider executives about the top challenges and opportunities they foresee for the coming year.  Eight out of ten responses cited social media and sentiment analysis: solutions that harvest opinions, attitudes, mood, and other subjective information from news, social media, surveys, and other forms of enterprise feedback.

Claire Thomas, text analytics lead at SAP, calls sentiment analysis "broadly applicable to various industries and initiatives." She captures the rationale for the up-coming Sentiment Analysis Symposium, a conference I am organizing, slated for April 13 in New York. 

Claire and SAP have not endorsed the symposium.  I'm quoting Claire and other industry leaders simply as evidence that a practical, solutions focused sentiment-analysis forum, bridging technology and business concerns, is sorely needed.

Behind the need:

IBM SPSS Vice President Olivier Jouve notes that "Twitter, Facebook and other Web 2.0 media are the new critical sources for marketing" and a range of other enterprise functions.  These functions include what's often now called "social CRM," customer relationship management that taps social sources.  I predict that category will be short-lived, just as early-2000's "e-commerce" is now just one facet of modern, comprehensive business solutions.

The fact is, "more companies are looking at 360-degree views of customer feedback, and social media is a critical early warning (before a customer buys) and customer support (when a customer is having issues) indicator of customer experience," as Clarabridge CEO Sid Banerjee puts it.

I'd guess we can all agree with these statements, but how to handle these and traditional information sources?

According to Lexalytics CEO Jeff Catlin, in 2010, "sentiment will complete its transition to a 'checklist' feature that everyone who works in this space will have to provide.  All of the vendors (big and small) will claim to have sentiment."  So there's a problem evaluating sometimes over-stated claims to choose an appropriate solution.

What's appropriate?  Many user organizations can get by -- for the present -- with what Attensity CTO Ian Hersey characterizes as "social media aggregation and lightweight analytics (e.g., buzz analysis, media monitoring)." 

The Sentiment Analysis Symposium will be for organizations with needs that range from focused to sophisticated, to users who, in Ian's words, want "to incorporate the social media into the same analytical models as they use for their internal data and, more important, plug that social media into business processes."

These enterprise scale users require solutions that, in Olivier Jouve's words, handle sources that are "voluminous, cryptic, multi-lingual and deeply interconnected" via "sophisticated data collection mechanisms, advanced multi-lingual analysis and the infrastructure to manage daily terabytes of data."

This being the BeyeNETWORK's text-analytics channel, I've quoted text-analytics industry leaders although I expect media-monitoring, listening platform, and brand/reputation management users, agencies, and solution providers will be well represented at the Sentiment Analysis Symposium.

So check out the event on-line -- follow @SentimentSymp or me, @SethGrimes, on Twitter for updates -- and you have until February 3 to submit a speaking proposal by the way -- and do send me your questions and comments.