This is only a possibility at the moment, but imagine a ConsumerBase plug-in for Salesforce.com that enables salespeople to quickly research a prospect company before visiting. It would be like each salesperson having his or her own virtual market researcher to identify the prospect company’s main pain point in the eyes of their customers. Armed with that insight, the salesperson could cut right to the chase and make a very effective pitch.

This idea, by the way, came from Chris Gong, a member of NetBase’s technical operations staff. I’d like to thank Chris for the idea and use this opportunity to point out again that being an innovative company requires being open to innovative ideas coming from anywhere in your organization, even from people in functions apparently unrelated to the area that can use the idea. So a big thanks to Chris for thinking outside the box.

Semantic Keyword Discovery—A New Category of Tools

I’m creating a new category of tools by calling ConsumerBase a Semantic Keyword Discovery tool to differentiate it from the existing category of Keyword Discovery tools. Keyword Discovery can tell you the search phrases people use to find products and services, as well as the search terms that drive traffic to your competitors. One example is SpyFu. A search analytics company, SpyFu shows the keywords that websites buy on Google AdWords, as well as the keywords that websites are showing up for within search results. The main value proposition is to see or to “spy on” the keywords that competitors use and improve SEM and SEO strategies based on those keywords.

Semantic Keyword Discovery is different because it finds semantically related keywords that we believe will resonate with shoppers in much more interesting ways than some of the Keyword Discovery approaches. Semantic Keyword Discovery isn’t intended to replace standard Keyword Discovery—it can serve as an adjunct, albeit a very valuable one. Standard Keyword Discovery gives you bread and butter keywords while Semantic Keyword Discovery gives you gravy. You need both.

An Example: Unexpected, Relevant Keywords for the Wii

Suppose you were a Web Marketer developing Google AdWords campaigns for the Nintendo Wii. You’d start with regular Keyword Discovery tools from Google, SpyFu, and others to get your bread and butter must-have keywords—the ones you want to advertise on to prevent your competition from doing so. But to get an extra edge, you need to find other related keywords that highly resonate with your consumers—semantically related keywords.

Here’s how you’d do that with ConsumerBase: In a ConsumerBase search on the Wii, you’d discover that Injury is listed in the Dislikes word cloud as something people dislike about the Wii (repetitive stress injury) but, counter-intuitively, you’d also discover it’s in the Likes word cloud as something they like, under the headings of stroke recovery and Wiihab. You’d find that people are using the Wii to improve coordination, for stroke recovery, and to treat Parkinson’s Disease. Drilling further into those results, and filtering the search on the word Injury, you’d learn that Kansas State researchers use the Wii to help restore soldiers’ balance after traumatic brain injuries. (For a quick overview of ConsumerBase and this process, you can watch this YouTube video.) A traditional Keyword Discovery tool wouldn’t uncover this because the relationship between Wii and Parkinson’s Disease can only be found by semantic analysis of consumer chatter in social media.

You could then use those diseases and conditions as keywords in your marketing—an insight your competitors probably don’t have and a means to direct people searching on those keywords to your site.

We added two icons in each widget enabling you to easily copy the chart image and export the chart data.

Copy Chart Image

To make a copy of a chart click the camera icon  located in the top right corner of the widget.

Depending on your browser and computer settings, this will either open a new browser page or an image viewer displaying the chart image. Simply right click on the image and select “Copy” and paste it into your presentation.

Export Chart Data

To export the data for a chart click the spreadsheet icon located in the top right corner of the widget.

This will enable you to save the chart data as a XML file, which you can open directly in Excel.

Compare Widget Display Option

We also added the option to display bar charts data as percent of total (in addition to total counts). This will enable you to compare percentages across one or more brands.

Feedback

Please visit our product Feedback page and let us know what you think and vote for the features you would most like to see in ConsumerBase.

What’s Next?

Some of the features we are working on for the next releases include:

• Timeline widget improvements
• Compare widget improvements

And, stay tuned for more to come …

I’ll keep this post short because you can find all the in-depth information in the PowerPoint, but here’s a quick executive overview:

• The study is an analysis of consumers’ perception of Listerine. The source data is social media, that is, content on the Internet generated by consumers in Internet forums, blogs, and microblogs.
• We do a quantitative analysis of the amount of discussion about Listerine relative to other topics and consumer sentiment about Listerine relative to other topics.
• We do a qualitative analysis on overall reasons consumers like or dislike Listerine and offer key insights about Listerine consumers.
• We discover and discuss a range of business opportunities for Listerine, including introducing a Soothing Power flavor and a non-alcohol-based formula for Gen Y users (with tongue piercings), and promoting it as a toenail fungus treatment and mosquito repellent.
• Key threats we uncover include alcohol abuse and drying out the mouth.

In summary, we found that:

• Consumers most like Listerine’s germ-killing action
• The most prevalent complaint from consumers is that Listerine is too harsh
• Listerine has a tremendous number of off-label uses for personal and home care based on its efficacy

There are even some Lead User insights in the netnography, for example, the one about dissolving suboxone. (Lead User provides useful information links for those interested in academic lead user research, or interested in lead user consulting projects for firms involving graduate student training or research.)

It simply wouldn’t be possible for an individual researcher, or even a team of researchers, to find, read, understand, and analyze the amount of social media content that ConsumerBase processed to very quickly build this netnography. Netnographies like this can deliver insights into consumer attitudes and behavior, and ideas for new markets and products, that businesses simply couldn’t get any other way.

If you’re interested in talking more about netnography, pre-register for our netnography best-practices forum we’re launching in September. The netnography best practices forum can be found at http://www.netnography.com/

Using ConsumerBase to research brands and the chatter about them, I have access to an enormous amount of information, some of it very surprising and unexpected—who’d have guessed that Snickers pair well with Madeira wine (see my earlier blog post for more inspiring wine matches)?! While a few of the results are just fun and quirky, many others can prove to be a real “aha!” moment for researchers and brand managers—genuinely useful insights that can lead to new products, applications or markets.

To demonstrate the power of ConsumerBase to read and understand millions of sites, postings, tweets, etc. on the Web and unearth some real gems, we put it to work on Alka Seltzer.

Our search revealed a range of uses, functions and thoughts on Alka Seltzer within the social media universe:

• Use Alka-Seltzer instead of baking powder to make a cherry cobbler qualify as a healthy snack.
• Children with any type of flu symptoms should not take aspirin or any medicine containing aspirin such as Pepto-Bismol and Alka-Seltzer because it could lead to Reyes Syndrome.
• Alka-Seltzer is cheaper and safer than most proprietary cleaning products, and is sometimes already in the home.
• My husband won’t even take Alka-Seltzer because “braving” the symptoms becomes a testosterone-soaked badge of manliness, like “walking it off” or “taking it like a man.”
• I just found out I am pregnant and the heartburn is excruciating but I can’t take Alka-Seltzer or anything with aspirin. Help!

So what do you think? Alka Seltzer as both a cleaning product AND a healthy baking alternative? Let me know your thoughts – and what brands you’d like some insight on next time.

How Affiliate Marketing Works
Affiliate marketing is a form of online marketing that uses one website to drive traffic to another. Typically, a retailer will reward affiliates for each visitor or customer brought to their site by the affiliate’s marketing efforts.

Some merchants run their own affiliate programs while others use third-party services to track traffic or sales that are referred from affiliates. For third-party affiliate management, merchants can choose from standalone software or hosted services, which are typically called affiliate networks. Payouts to affiliates can be made by the networks on behalf of the merchant.

Affiliates were among the earliest adopters of pay-per-click advertising. In 2000, Google launched its pay-per-click service, Google AdWords. As more and more merchants and affiliates bid on advertisers’ names, brands, trademarks and the keywords related to them, it became more and more difficult for affiliates to find unique keywords that could drive traffic to their site. (And from there, to the merchant’s site, thereby earning a commission.)

Finding Keyword White Space
One of the keys to getting affiliate marketing right, therefore, is driving traffic to your landing page where people can buy the products that you sell or advertise as an affiliate marketer. If you use Google AdWords, then you’re probably familiar with Google’s keyword tools that enable you to identify related keywords. But to get a lot of performance out of your affiliate marketing initiatives, you need to find keywords that no other affiliates are advertising on—you could call it “keyword white space.”

One avenue to pursue is Semantic Keyword Discovery, which is a way to find words and terms that are semantically related to the product you’re marketing. There’s a lot that the term “semantic” could refer to, so let me be more specific. A good semantically related keyword is one that’s related to the product in some special way; for instance, a term for the problem that the product solves. That way, if a consumer queries on the problem, your ad can come up as a solution. Imagine how motivated consumers would be to click your ad if they query on some medical condition they’ve just contracted, only to find that the high-end blender you’re marketing can help them cope with their new disease.

It just so happens that NetBase’s ConsumerBase product is good at Semantic Keyword Discovery. You simply put in the name of the product you’re marketing and it comes back with summaries of terms and phrases that are semantically related to the product. The semantic relationships it reveals are to keywords that represent benefits of the product, features of the product, and problems that the product solves.

Here are three examples:

• Wii—If you were selling the Wii, you could advertise on “brain injury.”
• Vita-Mix—If were selling the Vita-Mix blender, you could advertise on the unique benefit of increasing “bioavailability of food.”
• Listerine—If you were an affiliate for Drugstore.com, you could advertise on “toenail fungus.”

These are all examples of semantically related keywords we’ve discovered by running ConsumerBase on the brands listed above. For affiliate marketers, this innovative application of ConsumerBase to find keyword white space could make the difference between just getting by and becoming a super affiliate.

I’d like to thank my friends Alex Coisman and Joel Englander for introducing me to the world of affiliate marketing and helping me develop this application of ConsumerBase. Thanks guys!

Compare Widget

The Compare widget is used to do comparison of Emotions, Behavior, Opinions and more — across one or multiple brands.

You can easily add additional brands to include in your comparison.

This enables you to compare any Insight across multiple brands.

We placed the widget in a new “Labs” Dashboard tab as it’s a brand new widget we are enhancing.  We would love to get your initial feedback on it as we improve it in upcoming releases.

What’s Next?

Some of the features we are working on for the next releases include:

• Copying of charts into presentations
• Exporting chart data into spreadsheets
• Further widget enhancements

Please visit our product Feedback page and let us know what you think and vote for the features you would most like to see in ConsumerBase.

And, stay tuned for more to come …

• Lead User Method has you find people with such a dire need that they actually develop their own solutions.
• Netnography entails looking for people talking online about their needs (granted, Netnography encompasses a lot more than that, but hear me out for the sake of argument).
• Open Innovation is about scouting for solutions from outside your company’s four walls.
• Disruptive Theory says that you should find a market need that’s addressed by a high-cost solution and disrupt that market by introducing a low-cost solution.

Again, all these methodologies have a lot more to them than that, but my point is they all rely on needs and solutions. This has been a driving force behind the development of NetBase’s technology: We wanted to satisfy innovators of every ilk, no matter what innovation methodology they subscribe to. Of course, if you ask me, the ones I’ve mentioned above are the best; whichever one you choose, you’ll probably need the type of need information you can get from ConsumerBase and solution information from illumin8.

But let’s put my theory to a test. Challenge me: What’s an innovation methodology you know of? Can you come up with one that doesn’t depend on need and solution information?

Well, that same frustration is exactly what led me to found NetBase! When I was an young engineer at Ariba, I spent a year working on an innovative new product. But the project was cancelled and all the work that my colleagues and I had done was thrown out. It was devastating—all my professional work up to that point was just discarded. I didn’t want to see that happen again because I thought it was bad for the economy and I didn’t like it personally.

So I began researching the process of innovation with the goal of understanding it better and, ideally, finding ways to improve it. I started by examining the Ariba project and came to the conclusion that it had been cancelled because the work wasn’t related to a customer need; it was just an interesting idea. That’s when it occurred to me that the same explanation applies to many failed innovation projects within corporations: They fail when people developing products or services deep within a company aren’t connected to their customers and don’t know what their needs are.

That experience and that conclusion led me to study innovation at MIT and to found NetBase.

So now, using the ConsumerBase tool we’ve developed, business development guys can quickly and easily get a much better understanding of their customers—they don’t need to be in the dark anymore. They can source technologies and strategic partnerships with justification based on real quotes from consumers about what they want.

Going one step further, it’s worth making the point that people who can benefit from using ConsumerBase to understand consumers aren’t limited to market researchers or the biz dev people I mention here. ConsumerBase is for anyone in a company who could do a better job if they could just get a clearer understanding of what customers really want.

It’s almost the end of the summer, and as school buses gear up for their routes, moms, dads and kids are gearing up for school to start again. And for retailers across the country, that can mean only one thing: back-to-school shopping.

To find out where consumers are doing their shopping–and who they’re talking about–we used our ConsumerBase tool to surface opinions, emotions and behaviors being expressed in the social media universe.  This month’s Brand Passion Index takes a look at some of the biggest retailers for back-to-school shopping: Target, Old Navy, Macy’s, K-Mart, WalMart, Sears and JC Penney.

The insights found by ConsumerBase revealed that despite the low prices associated with Wal-Mart, consumers have relatively negative feelings and low chatter with the brand. Though the positive sentiment for Target isn’t quite as passionate as Old Navy, the discount retail giant has captured far and away the most chatter.

In this graphic, the amount of sentiment and chatter about a brand is indicated by the size of the bubble, while the placement of the bubble shows the intensity of passion.

And while WalMart pulled in $405 billion in the last year, consumers don’t seem too impressed with the quality or service at WalMart.

“This walmart is getting cheap and greedy and I wish they never opened this so called Super Center.”
“Plus I just plain old don’t like WalMart, because it’s gross and dirty and slow and awful and makes me doubt humanity.”
“Personally I don’t like Walmart’s clothes because the quality is terrible.”

Target, on the other hand, had glowing reviews for its low prices and varied selection.