Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book called Outliers a few years ago that examined what makes people successful - His other book, The Tipping Point, has become a must-read for many businesspeople worldwide -- particularly those involved with marketing).

Outlier is really a statistical term that describes an observation that is numerically distant from the rest of the data.  Sometimes this indicates a measurement error, other times, it indicates the existence of a heavy-tailed distribution (which Chris Anderson also wrote a book about called The Long Tail which described how the Internet changed business).

Recently, in my TripAdvisor Master Class, I talked about the idea of Outliers and how they applied to travel. The responses were so positive that I thought I'd share one of the examples here.

We analyzed English reviews that were written about hotels in each city on the TripAdvisor tour to see how positive or negative the sentiments in the reviews were.  As we are independent from TripAdvisor, we have our own technology to do the analysis that's vastly different and in more detail than what the summary numerical ratings provide.

To make a long story short, our technology basically rates each applicable review on a scale of positivity by auditing the words used by reviewers to describe their experience.

Here then is a distribution graph of reviews over a 16-month period on our scale.  This graph here is about Bangkok hotels.  The X-axis represents the range of rating, and the Y-axis counts the number of reviews we found in each range.

Full story:

www.webintravel.com/blog/getting-to-know-the-real-outliers-on-tripadvisor_1961