3 Tips to Amp Up Your Digital Marketing Game

In a recent post from the Harvard Business Review, author Greg Satell discusses the conundrum that digital marketers face: the catch 22 of crafting their message versus having it crafted for them. While consumers certainly have their place in brand storytelling, it is a brand’s job to lead the conversation. Whether the function falls under digital marketing- at the executive level…

Data Scientists Descend Upon the HQ

Last night, People Pattern HQ was delighted to play host to the inaugural Austin Data Meetup. As dusk approached and our courtyard filled with carefully locked bicycles and practically parked cars, over sixty Central Texas data scientists gathered inside to talk shop amongst boxes of local pizza and craft beer. The event highlighted Professor Jason Baldridge, Co-Founder and Chief Scientist at…

How to Perform Basic Text Analysis

My previous post “Titillating Titles: Uncoding SXSW Proposal Titles with Text Analytics” discusses a simple exploration I did into algorithmically rating SXSW titles, most of which I did while on a plane trip last week. What I did was pretty basic, and to demonstrate that, I’m following up that post with one that explicitly shows you how you can do it yourself,…

Text Analytics Unlocks the Secrets of Viral Titles

I’ve been meaning to find a chance to look into event titles and see whether some straight-forward Unix commands, text analytics and natural language processing can reveal anything interesting. For the purpose of my experiment, I focused on proposal titles for SXSW 2015 panels. People reportedly put a lot of thought into their titles since that is a big part…

SXSW 2015: People Pattern Picks

It’s hard to believe SXSW is almost here. It feels like only yesterday the world descended upon Austin for two weeks of mayhem in Central Texas. Although we can’t opt in or out of bad parking and promo girls pawning flyers for the next “VIP Event,” we do have panel-picking power. The discerning curators that we are, People Pattern has…

Market Research Matters in Social Media

There has been a significant shift in the methodologies used to build effective social media campaigns over the past 18 months. The industry has evolved. The impact of building an earned social engagement program has diminished. Summations of elementary analytics such as “likes”, “followers” and brand mentions are less meaningful to smart marketers today. The importance of integrating and adopting…

Intern Report: Data Science Dreaming

I remember my dad asking me if I wanted to intern at People Pattern this summer. At first, I wasn’t quite sure. My high school does not have any Computer Science classes, nor are many people as interested in technology as I am. In fact, friends usually seek me out with their various computer issues whenever they encounter problems. However…

The Secret To Happiness Is….Data for Better Brand Perception

A brand’s voice across social media plays a significant role when it comes to brand perception. In order for social to help rather than hurt perception it is important for market researchers to stay on top of fan trends and steer the brand in the right direction. By monitoring a brand’s audience – and then using surfaced data points to…

Intern Life: A Summer of Audience Insights

After my spring semester at the University of North Texas ended I had a choice, to either spend my summer internship in a big, cubicle-heavy, office in Dallas, or work for People Pattern at their World HQ in Austin. I was a little skeptical about heading that far away from my Dallas/Ft. Worth comfort zone and my home city of…

Emotional Contagion: Your Chance to Opt-In

This post is the last of a three part series covering the Facebook study on emotional contagion. As we noted in our first and second posts in this series, the original study (Kramer, Guillory and Hancock 2014) falls into an ethical gray zone. Allowing Facebook users to opt-in to (or opt-out of) such experiments would certainly address some of the ethical concerns, though limiting participants to…

Emotional Contagion: A Matter of Counting Words

Our post yesterday provided an overview of the recent Facebook study on emotional contagion and summarized the various responses to it. The wider issues are important to address, and I recommend reading yesterday’s post to see some different, and conflicting (but thoughtful), perspectives on those issues. In this post, I talk about some of the conversations we’ve had at People Pattern and…

Emotional Contagion: Contextualizing the Controversy

This is the first in a series of posts responding to the controversial Facebook study on Emotional Contagion  The past two weeks have seen a great deal of discussion around the recent computational social science study of Kramer, Guillory and Hancock (2014) “Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks” . I encourage you to read the published paper before getting…