What is Text analytics — a general term for the mining and interpretation of written words — has been used for more than two decades, most notably by the defense industry as far back as the Cold War to read into the word choices and text of, say, a speech written by Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Consider this, a definition in progress.

However, today it is marketers who are increasingly turning to text analytics to mine information from the mountains of customer data they’ve accrued from customer-service surveys, e-mails, online forums, hosted feedback sites and user-generated blogs. It’s a way to listen to the boss — customers — and hone marketing based upon those insights. In the blog atmosphere, participants decide what’s important to them.

Let’s take a look at how luxury hotel retail chain, Starwood Hotels addresses text analytics:

When Rebecca Gillan walks through the lobby of a Starwood hotel, she doesn’t want to hear the guests talking about “good” or even “very good” service. That’s because she knows “good” is only worth a six or seven when a guest fills out a customer service survey. She’d rather hear superlatives such as “excellent,” “outstanding” or even “cool,” because that’s where the nines and 10s are.

“You can have someone read through 100 comments, and they will likely overstate the importance of some concepts, understate the importance of some concepts and totally miss other things,” said Tom H.C. Anderson, managing partner, Anderson Analytics. “For instance, if one person in 100 mentioned something, it would be missed. But if in 100,000 responses, 1% of people say the same thing, it could be noticed as important, like a new trend that’s developing or something wrong with a product that’s just starting to surface.”

That core value of text analytics — plucking qualitative “aha’s” from hundreds of piles of unstructured text — is complemented by other marketing tactics, including competitive-intelligence gathering, real numeric tallies of positive and negative comments, short-term-goal checking and long-term-capital-spending value.

At this point, you may be asking yourself what this has to do with real estate marketing and social network communities. Why do text analytics matter to me? Before you can be at the top of anyone’s “friend” list or be considered an “influencer”, people need to be provided the platform to comment about who you are and what you are representing. Thinking about creating a “facebook” profile, but are still unsure of it’s reach & relevance? Facebook just hired a Google executive.

Once you receive a consistent amount of feedback, the layers slowly remove, allowing for a transparent authenticity to formulate. It’s important to garner value added comments in developing your network because it is these visitors who speak the language. Their intuition can often sense whether or not someone is joining solely for publicity purposes. Here is what consumer brand specialists are saying regarding text analytics:

“Text analytics is a new methodology for us, and we were very pleased with the results and the depth of insight,” said Catherine Cardoso, associate insights manager at Unilever, in a statement. “The results were helpful beyond understanding reactions to our campaign. We also gained an understanding of what motivates people on discussion boards, which issues are most important to women in our target group, and how to create better products and messaging for them A surge in meaningful data online to mine — and the ability of smarter, faster computers and programs to decipher it — is one of the reasons text analytics is finally catching on with marketers.

“There is all this information online, and now you have an imperative to do something with it,” said Seth Grimes, a consultant and technology analyst with Alta Plana. “Text analytics has grown hand in hand with the explosion in social media and online publishing.”

Granted, the blogosphere and social networks have so far not proved great advertising media, but text analytics offers the potential to make them stronger marketing vehicles. “A lot of marketers are paying a lot of attention to trying to figure out how to leverage social networking, for instance,” Mr. Anderson said. “This type of analysis is an answer in how to unlock the value of those social networks.”