Is It Just Noise or Is It Relevant Noise? — by Dan Lynn
By Dan Lynn
In 2004 we built an AI business called RelevantNoise. That's right, over 20 years ago we built an AI-powered technology platform that leveraged machine learning and natural language processing. It was very cool. We were ahead of our time. The following entry is from my blog back in 2004. it's fascinating to relive the excitement and energy. I want you to feel this way as an entrepreneur. I want this excitement to be part of your journey too.
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Today, everyone seems to have a podcast. However, the following is my blog post from 2004 - when everyone was just starting to have a blog.
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"We are right in the middle of an amazing and exciting period of "communication transformation." The impact that email, cell phones and text messaging are having on our lives is truly incredible. The bottom line is that the way we communicate today versus yesterday has been completely and dramatically altered. Everyone sees it and everyone is being impacted by it. From 10-year olds to 80-year olds - email, cell phones and text messaging have, overnight, become a standard way of life.
That's extremely exciting; however that's all basically for one-to-one communications - communicating from one individual to another individual. If you really want to get goosebumps, just look at what is happening to "one-to-many communications". Imagine how powerful it would be if every individual suddenly had the ability to communicate their thoughts, beliefs and experiences to the entire world. Imagine if the spark of a new idea could quickly be tested and enabled to gain momentum, or if a cancer survivor could instantly start to console others suffering from cancer, or if a successful entrepreneur could motivate and coach other aspiring entrepreneurs to realize their dreams. Well, emerging social media platforms and blogs are making all of that a reality.
Sure, people have been using the internet for years to do a lot of the things discussed above. However, new social media platforms like Facebook and new web publishing technologies like Blogger, Typepad and WordPress are enabling anyone, whether they have technical experience or not, to easily publish, manage and maintain a personal, dynamic website or have a powerful web presence. And the growing use of search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN -- and the new blog search engines like Technorati, Feedster and PubSub -- are enabling an audience hungry for specific information to easily find those new personal, idea-rich channels. So, instantly, anyone with something to say can start to say it and, if they have anything useful to say, can start to build a worldwide audience of loyal listeners overnight.
Now that's powerful and very exciting to a lot of people. So exciting, in fact, that there are 50,000 to 100,000 new blogs being published every day! Two years ago there were just 100,000 blogs. Today, there are already over 15 million blogs being updated, on average, about 3 times per week! So, if you have something to say and you haven't already set up a blog, go for it. You are now empowered to be heard!
Now, let's get down to the business possibilities of all of this.
Imagine the incredible power of tapping into that enormous conversation and pulling out business intelligence - knowing whether there is an emerging issue with your brand or what features customers really want in your products or what people are saying about your competitors. Well, good news: the social media phenomena is creating the most powerful market intelligence opportunity in the history of business. But the key is being able to pull the relevance out of all of that noise. Doing that requires the use of the most advanced text mining, search, and natural language processing technologies. It requires the development and deployment of complex tone extraction algorithms, business taxonomies and ontologies. And it requires leading technologists, marketers and analytics professionals dedicated to finding the gold in the noise.
Introducing RelevantNoise - a new company we've just launched with an amazing team of experienced marketing and technology professionals passionate about the emerging social media channels and the incredible business intelligence hidden within them. We're committed to pushing the boundaries of this technology further than any other company and are focused on being the best company in the World at mining social media for business intelligence - so that our clients just have to "Listen and Learn". Keep an eye on this one because the best is yet to come."
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It was fun to go back and see my blog post from 2004. RelevantNoise was an amazing technology that was acquired by a private equity company in 2007.
Questions this Key Learning answers
How do I find a business opportunity in a technology boom?
Look beyond the exciting new behavior to the problem it creates. Dan Lynn saw that mass online publishing would produce more conversation than companies could manually hear, classify, and interpret. Our analysis frames this as a recurring pattern: when technology creates abundance, the strongest opportunity may be the tool that filters that abundance into something useful.
What do you do when customers face too much information?
The author’s answer was to pull relevance from the noise. RelevantNoise used text mining, search, machine learning, and natural language processing to identify useful business intelligence in online conversations. As our analysis explains, when information becomes abundant, attention and judgment become scarce, creating demand for tools that help people listen, interpret, and learn.
How can I tell whether being early is actually useful?
Being early matters when excitement is connected to a precise customer problem. Dan Lynn did not only recognize that blogs and social platforms would let millions publish; he recognized that companies would struggle to understand the resulting conversation. Our analysis calls this the second-order need: spotting what widespread adoption will make difficult or impossible to do manually.