Blog #5

Text Mining

               Most businesses in the current age are overcome with massive amounts of data. Much of this data is useless to the business or discarded because there is not enough man power to sort through the data. In some cases the business does not even understand how to use the data. Text mining is a great tool that can allow a business to harness the power of information contained in available data. Data is all over the internet. Places like Twitter, Facebook and Google searches all contain data that a business could utilizes to grow their business. Having the ability to predict trends or understand what people are wanting out of a product or service is invaluable.  

                For example an e-business which utilizes data gathered from consumers who visit their website can create competitive advantage. When a returning or potential customer visits a business’s website they leave a trail of data. This data can be used to present products or services that the browsing customer has showed interest in. Providing a customer with products they are not interested in is a waste of resources and can also create a situation for missed sales. Having the ability to map a customer’s interest with the data they generate allows a company to target those interests. This utilization of data saves the company valuable resources and can generate more profit at the same time. The last company I worked for was a boat dealership. We would periodically send out an email with the boats we were selling to customers in our database. We had a service that would collect data on the people who opened the email as well as what boats they were viewing. This data allowed us to understand what boats the customer was most interested in and allowed for more accurate marketing.

                Another area that utilizes text mining is businesses that have large amounts of data like an insurance company. An insurance company can use text mining to isolate patterns in data that can help them form better policies for the future. It can also detect areas of fraud. If similar language or large amount of claims coming from a certain person can be gathered then a pattern of fraud can be detected and investigated. Also generating a pattern of the types of accidents in a certain geographic location using collected data can allow the company to address current policies in a certain area.

                Text mining is also used by governments. The intelligence community of any government can use text mining by sorting through data to gain information about other countries actions. Being able to extract specific data from mountains of information can allow a for faster response time to threats or prevention of conflicts. Governments collect large amounts of data and much of it is unwanted or unused but text mining can be used to highlight the data that may be relevant.