NetBase: Insight Delivered

I’m thrilled to announce that I’m joining NetBase as their Director of Social Strategy & Design and this post is a little introduction, so hi. Anyway, I’ve been convinced, ever since I started working on the internet in 1997, that it will radically and deeply transform business as we know it. Not just how we market, not just how we advertise, but how businesses create and deliver value. That transformation is well under way, some companies are leading, and some are being dragged, but few are untouched by the consumer revolution that is in progress.

I’m particularly thrilled to now be part of the NetBase team because I believe that our technology is going to allow companies to be much more strategic and less reactive to the new consumer landscape. In other words we’re going to help companies stop getting dragged and give them tools to help them create new products, services, and creative that will connect to the new consumer.

At NetBase we are solving an incredibly difficult problem; that is reading and understanding sentences at a massive scale (50,000 sentences a minute), and applying it to a problem close to my heart, understanding what customers think and want. This ability to read sentences means we are able to mine the web, especially the social web, for meaning and understanding from what consumers are really saying online. In the context of ConsumerBase we are helping organizations understand and be proactive at creating strategies to help them succeed in the emerging social eco-systems that they are increasingly finding themselves.

Many brands know that customers are talking about them and are just beginning to listen to customers and in some cases participate. The challenge is how can they can take a massive amount of what is essentially consumer feedback and use that information to improve products, create new ones, or even identify unmet needs that customers reveal online. This is where ConsumerBase comes in, our mission is to understand sentences at scale and provide an aggregate view of consumer feedback that is actionable and can drive decision making in the organization.

What I’m tremendously excited about is how many business processes in an organization can be informed by ConsumerBase. Basically any process that begins with consumer research and requires consumer insight can be augmented and often driven by the information out of ConsumerBase. I’ve been immersed in design management for over 10 years and I can’t think of many design/creative processes that are not kicked off with a consumer research phase trying to derive consumer insights around needs etc. Really important projects are kicked off by weeks of ethnographic research, market research, focus groups, surveys. ConsumerBase rapidly accelerates that process of moving from research to understanding, helping improve speed to market and increase the likelihood of success by serving customers real needs.

It’s no coincidence that simultaneous to unveiling Private Beta ConsumerBase at the ARF (Advertising Research Foundation) we are also releasing a paper by Professor Rob Kozinet called “Netnography: The Marketers Secret Weapon – How Social Media Understanding Drives Innovation”. Netnography is such a great term for how ConsumerBase enables consumer understanding, and I believe we can have as big an impact on business as Ethnography has over the last 20 years.

Thanks for reading this far, I’m not usually so verbose, but I’m super excited about this new adventure. I’d love to hear your thoughts on any of these topics and I will be keeping this blog updated as things evolve.

If you’re on twitter please follow our progress at @Net_Base, @consumerbased, and of course me, @karllong

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One of the many exciting things about being NetBase’s CMO is that I have a tool like ConsumerBase at my fingertips. This column will show ConsumerBase in action – I’ll occasionally point it at different brands and topics and report back the  insights I discover. You’re welcome to join the conversation and suggest what you’d like to see here in the future.

Recently, I looked at that familiar germ-killing mouthwash – Listerine.

Using ConsumerBase, I found many “novel uses” for Listerine that showed up repeatedly in consumer chatter. Here are the top 3 – did you know that Listerine is used:

• As a cure for toenail fungus
• As a treatment for athlete’s foot
• To keep floors extra clean

Who knew?!?  Maybe the makers of Listerine could also be in the athlete’s foot cream business!

ConsumerBase can also uncover what people like and dislike about a brand. My favorite insight about why people love Listerine?

• The smell of it reminds them of Grandpa

That one struck a chord for me personally, as my grandpa, “Handsome Hy”, was a “yellow user” himself and always smelled of it,  plus old spice.

Please feel free to add a comment and let me know where you’d like to see ConsumerBase pointed next. For now, I’ll pick a couple of topics and deliver the insights I discover in this column.

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The exponential growth of online information is truly mind-boggling. Everyday there are almost 50 million tweets on Twitter, not to mention 60 million status updates on Facebook. And don’t get me started on trying to keep up with my favorite blogs on a regular basis.

Bruce Sterling got it precisely right when he said, “Ultimately no human brain, no planet full of human brains, can possibly catalog the dark, expanding ocean of data we spew. […] We won’t be surfing with search engines any more. We’ll be trawling with engines of meaning.”

As the social media explosion changes society, businesses that can tap-in to authentic conversations online and extract real value, real insight, will own the marketplace. It all started with monitoring social media channels, then came the buzz around listening. For us, UNDERSTANDING is the sea change.

Instead of merely looking at raw data, companies need to quickly understand “what,” “why,” and  ”how” to get to the heart of consumers’ opinions, needs, and emotions. Tom O’Brian makes an interesting distinction between monitoring and going beyond in a recent blog post where he defines each in the following way:

Brand Monitoring: Tracking online brand mentions on a daily basis for PR, operations and customer service outreach.

Brand Research: Analyzing naturally occurring online categories of conversation to better understand why people do what they do, the role of brands in their lives and the product, branding and communications implications for brand owners.

He calls it Brand Research, we think it is part of something broader which we call social media understanding and it’s helping our clients unlock the potential of digital information. It’ll be interesting to see how other companies get on board and where it goes from here. What offerings have you seen around understanding?

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As individuals, we spend our lives searching for something, whether it’s true love, the meaning of life, or our lost car keys. Companies are also on the hunt, seeking insight. One of the most challenging things for them to find is real, meaningful consumer insight to drive their product innovation, packaging, advertising and other strategic decisions.

As the Insight Discovery company, that’s what NetBase is here to provide.

Our focus is on developing next-generation semantic technology that can read sentences and deliver insights based on information from billions of online public and private sources – and we do this at scale. We can read and understand social media content and all types of internal documents. Companies then use these insights to make game-changing business decisions that are based on consumer-generated information and what I call social UNDERSTANDING.

We at NetBase live and breathe semantic search, and we’re passionate about what it can do. We’re launching this blog now so we can have a conversation about insight and share our thoughts about a wide range of topics related to search and social media. It’s also a way to keep you up to date on company and product developments, like today’s news that has us all excited: NetBase received $9M in a Series C round of funding today.

We’re looking forward to hearing from the community and hope you’ll dive into the conversations too to share your ideas and viewpoints.

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