Transforming Unstructured Data into Market Intelligence: An interview with WiseWindow

At the end of last year, I sat down with my good friend and former colleague Marshall Toplansky to talk about how he is driving marketing innovation at WiseWindow- a company that he helped found and now runs as President.   WiseWindow is a company that is taking the unstructured data found on the Internet and social media and turning that into streams of useful data that marketers can use to track customer attitudes around brand and brand attributes.

You will find excerpts from the interview in the video clip below.  We talk about the evolution of sentiment analysis, how WiseWindow is driving innovation in this area(7:45),  and the benefits that accrue to companies that have chosen to innovate using his technology(12:30).

My core insights from our discussion included the following:

• Sentiment analysis is rapidly gaining acceptance as an alternative/supplement  to traditional methods of measuring consumer attitudes including voice of customer, customer satisfaction, and net promoter score.

• In many ways, sentiment analysis is superior because it can account for a much larger population sample on a broader array of topics than traditional methods and do it continuously.  This creates the ability to track the changes in attitudes based on tactics that a company might employ to improve positioning in the marketplace.   In short, the fact that sentiment analysis  is orders of magnitude faster and cheaper, is leading to new paradigms in terms of how companies can track sentiment nearly real time and then focus resources to respond.

• Related to the point above, the predictive power of sentiment analysis is unleashed when companies are able to find relationships between customer attitudes and business performance.

• WiseWindow is driving innovation in this area by using pattern recognition technology to address the fact that different word combinations reflect different sentiments depending on the  context in which  a company operates. In sum, it is using web crawling technology in conjunction with natural language processing algorithms to not only track what people are saying about its clients, but also what they are saying about the specific attributes of the products, brands, and competitors.

• While financial services businesses have been early adopters of this technology, successful case studies are emerging in media and entertainment, autos, and election tracking.

For access to the full interview (a little over 60 minutes) I have included a podcast version of the talk.  Enjoy!

Transforming Unstructured Data into Market Intelligence: An Interview with WiseWindow

 

Are You “Customer Centric”?

More great stuff from the folks at the Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative (WCAI).

Yesterday, Wharton Professor Peter Fader released a new book entitled Customer Centricity.    I had the privilege of reviewing a pre-release copy of the book and was struck by some really interesting and insightful points that Peter highlights in it.

Specifically,

Did you realize that some of the greatest brands in business history- Starbucks, Nordstrom and yes, even Apple have a long way to go in terms of optimizing the value of their customers?

Shocking right?  But Peter makes a compelling case that some of the most successful (and valuable) companies still have room to grow in terms of deepening their understanding of their existing customers and using this information to create custom offerings that strengthen ties and add to the value of the customer relationships that these companies already have.

Did you know that oversimplification of how you classify customers has significant consequences in terms of the effort/investment that you should be making to make your most important customers happy?

There is a great discussion (and a specific example on the wireless industry) in the book about how an oversimplified view of customer churn can cause companies to overlook and under-invest in some of their most important relationships.

Did you know that analysis of customer value could represent an entirely new way of evaluating investment choices?

In the book, Peter introduces the idea of customer equity (the combined lifetime value of all of its customers) as an increasingly accepted metric for considering the value of certain types of firms.  While challenging to execute, Peter points out that this may be an approach that is far more tangible and quantifiable than other measures such as brand equity.

These are but a few of the topics that he compellingly covers in this book.  Peter is quick to point out that his ideas on customer centricity are more applicable to certain types of companies, but if you are a part of an entity that has large numbers of customers, sells services on a subscription basis (SaaS providers- are you listening?), has the ability to create custom offers, or is interested in investing in companies that have these characteristics, then this book lots to offer.  I would highly recommend it.

For more information on the book and how to get it, click here.

Why Branding Matters

I was at a forum this week focused on helping a specific B2B technology/services company gain traction on an offering that was designed to provide enterprise security for mobile devices (target market is $1B+ in revenues).   As with many of the clients that I have worked with they struggled with the following:

1)      Shortening sales cycles

2)      Building brand recognition for a new offering

3)      Moving into an adjacent market with different decision makers

I will post more on my blog in future posts on topic #1, but I wanted to share the thoughts of one of the panelists on the forum- a CTO of a major hospital system- precisely the target customer for the company’s offering.  I got two main insights from his contributions to the talk.

1)      Brand recognition matters in so far as it helps in weed through deluge of communications that he gets from vendors on a daily basis .  “I get 60+ emails a day from people trying to sell me stuff.  If I have never heard of the company before, there is no chance that I will open an email or take a call from them.”

2)      References from his peers matter.  From same CTO- “If my peers are other organizations are talking about a new technology or company, I take notice.”

In my operating experience and as a business owner and entrepreneur, I have struggled with investments in branding not only because of the expense, but also because of the difficulty of tracking what meaningful results, if any, might result from these “investments.”

But clearly, as  the example of the CTO mentioned earlier- it helps drive effectiveness of sales and marketing and makes the path to the decision maker more efficient as well.

The good news here is that with social networking there are new and inexpensive ways to not only drive brand awareness, but also to begin tracking the effectiveness of these efforts.  To be sure, effective use of B2B social networking for the purposes of effective lead generation is in its infancy, but we see it as a critical means of driving efficiency and advantage versus some of the older methods that many B2B companies struggle to generate results from today.  In future posts, we will explore more specifically how this is done, but for now you may want to check out the following:

For B2B Social Networking: http://bit.ly/fslfC6

For B2B Brand Measurement/Tracking: http://buswk.co/e1tQgp