• January 20, 2009
• Blog

A conversation with Rob Key from Converseon

We've discussed social media optimization or making the most out of social media. Here's the future and it's here now. Recently I talked to Rob Key, CEO of Converseon. This is a guy that is brilliant and is out there ahead of most of his peers. His company is focused on analyzing the massive amounts of data being generated by people online about brands. The sheer volumes of data have become impractical for manual analysis. Enter sentiment and text analysis aka conversation mining technology. This is Babel on exponential steroids. Blogs, micro-blogs, forums, p-to-p sites, social networks, YouTube, and more. Capturing the conversations is the first part. Next you've got to understand what's being said. Converseon, Rob's company, actually utilizes sentiment and text analysis (which is algorithm-based) to understand what simple conversations mean. Humans add the finishing touches with more sophisticated conversations, which might have slang and more complex nuances. At the end of the day, the power of social media continues to snowball. The question isn't whether conversations are happening and if you're a part of them. It’s about what's really being said and whether you can process this mass and understand it. Because, before you can talk, you've got to know what's being said.

Check out the interview.

- Duncan Alney Facebook | Twitter | Naymz