The curious case of Benjamin Koe
Koe
Published: Jan 28, 2009
- New company JamiQ launches
- Focused on sentiment analysis
- Founded by Benjamin Koe, Lee Jia Yi, Kelvin Quee
Singapore - Hill & Knowlton Singapore's former PR and social media consultant Benjamin Koe has resurfaced to launch JamiQ, a five month old startup company specializing in mining for opinions and sentiment analysis on the web.
Last week JamiQ officially announced the launch of JamiQ Insights, a customized opinion mining and sentiment analysis service. Koe declined to name his clients but said he was seeing a range of partners from across the board including consumer electronics, government agencies, PR agencies, interactive agencies and advertising agencies as well. The bulk of the company's client base does currently come from the marketing community.
"It's not just marketing though. Government agencies approach us and want to find out what's happening on the ground as a research basis for future policies," Koe, CEO of JamiQ, said.
JamiQ uses data mining techniques to mine millions of web sites to extract what it deems the most significant opinions on brands, products, and services which are then processed for sentiment through the company's custom-built natural language processing technology. JamiQ also extracts influence ratings as well as market breakdown of the opinions which can help marketers understand what is being said about their products, which markets the brand is "loved" in, and also identify a potential groundswell of complaints about products and services.
However, the technology, because of the nature of internet user habits, is unable to identify every individual expressing opinion.
"There's no way to mine that online, people can write online anonymously. What we are focused on now is not the ‘who' but the ‘what'. At this point in time, our focus is sentiment analysis," Koe said.
"The ability to mine millions of user-generated opinions across a multitude of social media platforms and analyzing their sentiment with artificial intelligence gives corporations unique insights that were once humanly impossible to observe."
The company's other two co-founders are Lee Jia Yi and Kelvin Quee.
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This reminds me of the rapid growth in digital specialist agencies a good 10 years ago and the soul searching that went on among clients about whether, in the relatively embryonic field of online marketing, they should go with an agency with a bolted on digital arm or a pure play start up.
The agency offered credibility, resourcing and relationships while the start ups seemed to be closer to what was hot or not.
And a lot of what was hot has been consigned to the garbage bin of entrepreneurial history around 2001. However some start ups are still around and they now have heritage in the game and are very good at what they do.
Online opinion is a staggeringly important currency today for marketers or anyone concerned about reputation and there is likely to be a lot of companies which set up to measure and monitor it. However plenty of the big agencies, PR consultancies and research shops have been in the space for some time. The question is what is important, how do you rate what is said on a personal facebook site compared to a furious consumer who, say, writes a hate message on the GM company's site about a product they have bought. The most important aspect is the analysis. We forever make fun of the cliche of the hapless marketer who wanders into his agency and says "get me some of that viral stuff", but this can be much the same thing. These sorts of companies may be able to measure what people are saying about you in the social arena, but then what does that mean and what do you do with that knowledge?
This will be a very interesting field to follow, I predict strong growth here and then a serious shake out in a few years time when marketers decide who they trust and more importantly who gets results for the right price.
@ hardjoe. Not so sure i agree 100% with your comments on the quality of the people who participate in the social networks. Then again there's not much point if I start a counter argument to your general statements on the basis of posting more generalizations. Nice headline on the story..