CHICAGO, 06/15/09 -- With the increased popularity of social media, including blog postings, Twitter and Facebook status updates, and chat board responses, consumers are freely sharing opinions, beliefs, preferences and sentiments like never before. To proactively capture and analyze these consumer responses, Rosetta Stone Inc. (NYSE:RST), a leading provider of technology-based language-learning solutions, relies on SPSS Inc. (Nasdaq: SPSS), the leading global provider of Predictive Analytics software and solutions, to uncover hidden trends in text responses to improve customer satisfaction, product development and marketing effectiveness.

Available in more than 30 languages, the Rosetta Stone language-learning solution is used by schools, organizations and millions of individuals in more than 150 countries throughout the world. To better understand consumer attitudes about its products, Rosetta Stone selected PASW Text Analytics text mining workbench (formerly Text Mining for Clementine) to uncover unsolicited feedback from online websites on customer product reviews, monitor competitor websites and analyze open-ended survey questionnaires.

Nino Ninov, vice president of strategic research and analysis at Rosetta Stone, said, “Our goal is to empower people around the world to change their lives through learning new languages, so it is imperative that we gather direct feedback to better understand the attitudes, preferences and sentiments of Rosetta Stone customers. PASW Text Analytics allows us to leverage unsolicited and unbiased customer feedback to listen and respond to the ‘Voice of our Customer’ and strategically improve our business.”

PASW Text Analytics leverages the critical insights and sentiments locked in unstructured data – including call center notes, open-ended survey responses, blogs and wikis – to uncover hidden patterns, relationships and trends in text. SPSS Text Analytics harnesses unfiltered and unedited information to reduce customer churn, improve satisfaction, fight crime, detect fraud and increase marketing campaign results.

As Rosetta Stone products are often reviewed online, the company wanted to understand what customers were saying from their experience and recognize why certain customers are brand promoters or brand detractors. Rosetta Stone selected PASW Text Analytics to extract key concepts and online sentiments to connect textual relationships and employ that information for actionable insight into improving the business.

For example, the company sought to better understand what topics of conversation were most common on websites – not just positive or negative comments – and then use that information to understand how customers speak about product offerings and what is most important to the customer. This feedback is used to ensure product development and marketing messages align with customer needs, attitudes and preferences.

Rosetta Stone also uses PASW Text Analytics to monitor competitor and industry web sites, including blogs and news feeds, and other publicly available textual information to maintain a current view of competitors and better understand how the public perceives other products.

Additionally, Rosetta Stone annually surveys thousands of current customers and the general public to better understand language learning – including why an individual wants to learn a new language or how they want to learn the language. These surveys include an open-ended field so respondents can write-in responses in their own words. To extract, classify and analyze these open-ended responses transforms unstructured, qualitative data into a format that allows the company to analyze it.

Olivier Jouve, vice president of corporate development at SPSS, said, “The words people use to express their thoughts and feelings in an online forum provide an tremendous amount of hidden meaning that organizations use to better understand the ‘Voice of the Customer’ and respond appropriately. Innovative organizations recognize that using PASW Text Analytics to quickly analyze and gain full value from text responses – in multiple languages – delivers a complete and accurate view of future customer actions and behaviors.”

Availability

The entire portfolio of SPSS Predictive Analytics Software – data collection, statistics, modeling, text analytics and deployment – is available by calling 1-800-543-2185.

About Rosetta Stone

Rosetta Stone Inc. is changing the way the world learns languages. Rosetta Stone offers an interactive solution that is acclaimed for its speed and power to unlock the natural language-learning ability in everyone. Available in more than 30 languages, the Rosetta Stone language-learning solution is used by schools, organizations and millions of individuals in over 150 countries throughout the world. The company was founded in 1992 on the core beliefs that learning a language should be natural and instinctive, and that interactive technology can replicate and activate the immersion method powerfully for learners of any age. The company is based in Arlington, Va. For more information, visit www.RosettaStone.com.

“Rosetta Stone” is a registered trademark of Rosetta Stone Ltd.