According to these two articles, Umbria has a new offering called Tribe Analysis. While the articles include a certain amount of hyperbole regarding their competitive position, what I do see as being unique with this offering is the inclusion of associative data mining from blog data. Mining associations in data is a central theme in data mining (see this classic paper). Thus far, while much research and product development in the space has concentrated on tracking topics and summarizing data sets (e.g. slices of posts filtered by certain features such as time ranges, demographics, etc.) - Tribe Analysis may be the first to deploy this core type of associative analytic in its products.
Umbria says one application will be to identify where there is potential for co-marketing programmes. For example, if it is found that people buying flat screen TVs are also interested in mountain biking, marketing tactics such a sponsoring a bike race could be implemented; or if people interested in the latest mobile phone technology also like watching specific sports games, a telecoms supplier might choose to make those games available by download to mobile phone subscribers.
Of course, this is all just talk right now. Umbria occasionally releases report samples on their web site, so it would be great to see an example which highlights this new technology.
Note that, as far as I can tell, there is no press release around this, just these articles published elsewhere.
Hi Matthew,
A press release was sent on Tuesday, March 6th. Here's the link:
http://www.umbrialistens.com/news_events/releases/2007Mar6_tribe_analysis.php
Michael
Posted by: Michael Sevilla | March 15, 2007 at 10:31 AM