VRM

VRM, Vendor Relationship Mangement.  Want an introduction to the idea, this video does a great job.

mepath labs/developers

A blog post from mepath, apologies for the intermission in posts.  We have been busy coding for the new mepath website.  Some of the ideas are taking shape, you can see what we have been up to at mepath labs/developers section.

Continuing the whisky theme we have a lifestyle linking whisky product example, here type in a word  e.g. Islay . This a famous Scottish Island for distilling whisky, we do a good job of listing the products made there, Bowmore tops the list.  What is the magic?  We did not query any whisky product database of whiskies for these results, but instead we used the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ of 120 bloggers that authored posts on Scotland.

We have use this same method for lifestyle linking amazon.com

“Customer Service as Community, Community as Customer Service”

The title says it all and GetSatisfaction have a great posting on this topic that includes a video of a panel discussing, “Customer Service as Community, Community as Customer Service”

Lifestyle linking Whisky & Food

Or should I say more accurately, lifestyle linking whisky with foods and other drinks. The question behind this is straight forward: When the online community tell their stories about whisky what other foods and drinks are also mentioned?

The Lifestyle linking Whisky and Food chart shows WINE, tops the list. With beer following on, two intuitive placings given the area of conversations is alcohol.

What about the foods? Bread comes in at no.3. Given the Scottish nature of the product (whisky), Haggis lists high. January is the month of Burns Night after all.

The scoring of the foods are based solely on frequency of appearance in whisky conversations. We can score there occurrence in context but for this introductory chart we have just charted based on frequency of mentions.

Lifestyle linking Vodka: The Party Crowd

What are the online drinking community saying in their stories about vodka? Partying.

It is the clear lifestyle high scorer in terms of frequency and positive vocabulary used. See the full Lifestyle linking Vodka chart.

January ‘08 Commentary: Scotch Whisky 100

Headlines:

Another Islay whisky tops Scotch Whisky 100, well done to Lagavulin.

Macallan keeps steady in the top 5 with Laphroaig re-joining at no.2.

Fettercairn makes a surprise top 5 placing.

Further commentary:

Whyte & Mackay brands of The Dalmore and Fettercairn make the top 5. Fettercairn could be seen as a surprise brand inclusion. Last month it was Tobermory inclusion in the top 5 that produced a few comments which we thank you for. With Tobermory it was not mentioned that many times in blogs but when it did, it scored high. Fettercairn is different, it is scoring real high on number of mentions and when it is mentioned in context, it score really well too. Be interesting to know why the online community has sparked such interest?

The volatility of movement in the top 30 is less marked than Decembers index. We still have new entries with Highland Park and Speyside Distillers. These two brands present a challenge: both the words, Highland and Speyside are used in a much wider context than a bottle of whisky, i.e. regions of Scotland or referring to the Scottish mountains etc. For the Scotch Whisky 100 we want to score these two brands words on their whisky context and this month we have included them as we apply a new scoring technique to our service.

Positive Scoring of a brand:

We score brands on the frequency they appear online and score them on the context they appear. The scoring is based upon these following words coming up in context of a whisky brand:

malt
single
skye
speyside
whiskey
whisky
blend

dram
favorite
favourite
good
great
highland
islay
like
happy
positive
scotch

These words are: words to name whisky, whisky regions and positive words to do with the whisky experience.

We are building a more sophisticated scoring model, if you have ideas on that please get in touch. Also, remember the Scotch Whisky 100 is deigned to give an industry wide, consistent view of whisky conversations. The scoring words can be personalized for each brand, we have done that and for that service we offer a paying service.

Whisky Countries

Which country is talked most about in the context of Whisky?  According to our analysis, Scotland unsurprisingly tops the list.  With our Celtic cousins, Ireland coming in second place.

You can view the full Whisky Countries Analysis BETA on our site.

lifestyle linking whisky BETA

Lifestyle linking is the vision behind mepath.com. What is lifestyle linking whisky BETA? The chart scores what lifestyles are being lived while individuals are telling their stories about whisky. Our BETA index does not contain all lifestyles, but we selected a list of social, sporting and past-times to illustrate.

Headlines:

Festival goers top the lifestyle list with music at no.3

There is lots to read on the Internet and reading completes the top three, coming in a no.2

The full Lifestyle Linking Whisky is still in BETA and is based upon 2007 online conversations.

A couple of surprises, Football and Rugby do not make the top 10. This could be that football conversations take place in specialist forums. We shall see if that is the case as we expand the volume of conversations analysed.

Alcohol & Health - responsible drinking index

The BBC website features a news article today entitled, A Little Alcohol ‘can be healthy’ .  The article is based on a European Heart Journal study that suggests individuals that undertake exercise and drink moderately have less of a probability of developing heart disease than individuals that exercise and do not drink at all.  You’ll need to read the full article to get the substance of the findings.

In the mepath lab we have been experimenting to see whether we can extract analysis on responsible drinking from the conversation authored on the Internet?   What have we been trying?  Well, we created a list of key words, like drunk, intoxicated, sick etc. and scored them against the context they appear and their frequency of occurrence.  We can even correlate this scoring to individual brands to see if there is any particular products that irresponsible drinking is associated with?  Every alcohol website has a link to the responsible drinking code, and the industry makes investments to support education on responsible drinking.  We would be happy to share our experimental finding with the industry so if you want to help us further in this cause, drop us a comment on this blog posting or email  james (at) mepath.com .

Frequency V Context scoring

What is more important: The absolute frequency a brand is talked about online or the context surrounding those conversations?

The Scotch Whisky 100 has some classic examples, Tobermory stands out as one. The volume of conversations authored for Tobermory are significanlty less than the top 10 brands in the Index. However, for the range of words chosen to be positively scored against the community, it scores high. mepath has selected a weighting between the frequency and context for the Scotch Whisky 100.

However, customers of the mepath marketplace have the opportunity to view the analysis and set the scoring rules base upon what they deem to be important. This process can also be repeated by segmenting the sources of conversations e.g. whisky forums, social networks with a younger outlook or even a geographic location.