Picture the social grid of public opinion on the World Wide Web,
the concourse of ideas where daily interchange about your company and your brands is transacted 24/7. Be it in the blogosphere, the Twitterverse, a product review site, a gallery on Flickr, or the many outlets of Googledom, people are typing, texting and commenting on your brand name virtually around the clock and around the world. Now imagine this information can be captured, sorted, rated and ranked. Suddenly you have the ability to respond to the public’s hue and cry with true dialogue, engaging the media and the public’s most authoritative influencers according to their stature and audience. Is public sentiment about your latest marketing venture cool, neutral or red hot? TruCast wants you to know.
What does a true measure of social interaction mean to today’s marketer? That all depends. If you are a brand manager for General Motors, the ability to accurately gauge public opinion might determine whether you will survive a pre-structured corporate realignment without alienating your market base, or which cars you should be manufacturing. If you’re Microsoft, you might learn what will become most popular in Windows 7.0 compared to consumer sentiment about Windows Vista.
Understanding how to read the social barometer, what was once the traditional art and science of pollsters, focus groups and Nielsen surveys, has been transformed. We have arrived in the new world of computer-mediated monitoring of the social media sphere. Though it may seem like science fiction to some, it is a very real place that records very real social opinions, as real as Twitter querying “What are you doing now?” and your response.
Seattle-based Visible Technologies has packaged a powerful suite of services under the name of TruCast. Last month it walked away with the 2009 Industry Achievement Award from the Washington Technology Industry Association for Commercial Service of the Year.
We spoke to Blake Cahill, Visible’s SVP of Marketing, on the day the company was trading its Pioneer Square digs for a more spacious floor plan in Bellevue to learn how TruCast has cast the mold for social media monitoring and engagement among the world’s leading brands.
Seattle24x7: Congratulations on the WTIA IAA award for TruCast as Commercial Service of the Year.
Blake Cahill: We do so much of our business outside of the Seattle area, with advertising agencies and brands around the country that it’s nice to be recognized in our own backyard. This was the first year that the community itself voted for the winners so it was much appreciated and ironic since we are a social media company. I was very pleased but also a little nervous, what if we didn’t win, this is the space we evangelize to brands.
Seattle24x7: Visible has become well established in the social sphere for monitoring the social buzz and the public sentiments around different brands and topics. Were you one of the very first in the category?
Cahill: The category has been with us for some time. It began in forums and on blogs as social conversation. Market research companies like Nielsen have been analyzing channels of interaction in electronic media for decades, first TV viewership and then Internet, email and call center information. Traditionally, though, it has all been done through a panel or reports documented maybe once a month or quarterly. You could not know in real time what was happening in the market. We came along as one of the first to create that capability from a software perspective with Software-as-a-Service and real-time, on demand, 24/7 access to conversations in the social graph. We are allowing brands to listen to conversations in social media and engage in social media interactions right out of our application.
Seattle24x7: You’re a WPP company. I’m guessing that has given you access to much of the advertising and PR world on the global stage?
Cahill: Yes, WPP owns a portion of us but we are not a wholly owned company. The WPP investment was more than just dollars. It also gave us access to the 150-plus agencies that they hold underneath their corporate umbrella, which is every leading name in the agency business: Y&R, Burson Marsteller, Wunderman, Grey, Ogilvy and we partner with those agencies to deploy our solution on behalf of their clients. Locally, Ignition Partners in Bellevue was our series B so between Ignition and WPP, we’ve had about $15.5 million dollars invested in the business.
Seattle24x7: How can you measure the sentiment of public opinion online, and know whether it is positive or negative?
Cahill: We work with brands up front to find out how they want to measure sentiment. What is considered positive or negative in terms of these conversations? Sometimes it’s like trying to find needles in haystacks in terms of what is actually meaningful or actionable.
We may look for the word “We” versus “I” or words like “love“ versus ”hate.” We set up different ways to analyze the conversations as they are posted, certain key words and attributes. Interestingly, anywhere from 60-80% of conversations in social media have no expressions that have an intrinsic value one way or another. “I went into Starbucks today and I got back in the car. ” Does the Starbuck’s brand manager care about that? No. What the brand manager cares about is “I really hate GM because they are killing Detroit.” or “We really support GM because they are trying to keep the industry alive.“ We automate that listening process, defining what is good, bad or unexpressed.
Seattle24x7: You are also able to look at the”who“in addition to the”what“ and find out who is influencing public opinion?
Cahill: Using TruCast, a client can drill down and find, ”Hey Larry wrote a favorable article or negative article about Visible Technologies. He has got a thousand followers. He is pretty influential. But look over here. Mike Arrington said something equally positive about me and he has even more followers at TechCrunch, so maybe I need to interact more with TechCrunch than Larry.“
Seattle24x7: I’ll try not to take it personally.
Cahill: Funny, that’s not to say you’re not important. Our software allows brands and agencies to determine who, what, when and where are the most important conversations happening and how to prioritize where to engage. We have ecosystem graphs and different ways of measuring influence based on a number of different algorithms and weightings. I may choose to respond to everything negative and try to convert you. Then again, imagine you are a Product Manager at Microsoft where there are tens of thousands of mentions of the word Microsoft every single day. You need to find those social conversations that matter to your particular product or group, not every mention of Microsoft. If you are the product manager for IE-7, you only see those conversations. Everything gets filtered and only sent to the team and subject matter experts that they actually care about.
Seattle24x7: To monitor and record all of those conversations must require a staggering infrastructure?
Cahill: We’ve got about 200 million pieces of content stored and that amount is growing at about one million a week. We call it the data tsunami and we’re busy ingesting and scaling it as we grow. Those numbers could be even bigger but the thing to keep in mind is we are trying to map it and match it to what is relevant. Let’s call it our first level of structured data that we pull in because we have matched it to what our clients actually want. We process it via topic matching, keyword matching, sentiment matching. So the funnel gets smaller and smaller because what you need to deliver to the brand or the marketer are the pieces they really care about. That’s really the thinking behind how we built it out.
Seattle24x7: What percentage of the data stream would be say blog posts and comments versus Twitter tweets versus a forum, or threaded discussion board. How does it break down proportionally?
Cahill: It depends on the client and by the vertical. So for instance, in the Tech space, there are a lot more forum conversations than say in consumer package goods. Twitter is growing at a very rapid clip in terms of brand mentions and interactions, so that is a huge source. Blogs and forums continue to be the main places where we are collecting data whereas Twitter and microblogging are new. In YouTube or Flicker, if the brand is mentioned we will report on it. We don’t presently analyze the conversations inside of a video segmentation on it, but if someone titled the video said ”Hormel Foods rocks“ and or there’s a Flicker photo, we’ll add that link. For the most part, our clients want to have a holistic view of any social content being said or created by consumer and they want to have all in one place.
Seattle24x7: You are also looking at things like Epinions and Amazon reviews and product stuff like that?
Cahill: Absolutely. We collect anything that is public. We follow everyone’s Terms of Use policies for collecting conversations and comments. We are not in Facebook at the moment. LinkedIn is a closed network. But things are opening up and as they start to open up, data will start to flow.
Seattle24x7: And you are processing all of this data in real time?
Cahill: We understood 3 years ago that the volume and cycle of online conversation was going to excel so much that there was no way a daily report, weekly report or monthly reports would be enough, and that brands would have to leverage software in order to automate what is a huge volume of data to process, in a way the group could interact with it. We also understood we would need to get the data to the right person for them to react to it. You’re not going to give a customer service inquiry to a market research person or a product person. As the product roadmap evolves, we release enhancements to the technology on about a six-week cycle. Some portion of it is always customer basing, some on the backend. Our CTO is former Microsoft GM that was one of their 36 Distinguished Engineers named Bill Baker.
Seattle24x7: In addition to TruCast, you also offer TruCast Benchmarks, what can you tell us about that?
Cahill: Trucast Benchmarks is an analysis of social data for a brand via report format. A brand may say, we want to launch a new product to bloggers and some of our competitors might be doing this, or simply tell me about my brand and social media as it compares to our competitors, so we can take a snapshot. Instead of the client deploying our software and we fast-forward the processes by extract the data about their and delivering an initial comprehensive snapshot conversations in the social graph about their. Typically, this is done in parallel with the deployment of our software.
Seattle24x7: TruView is yet another member of the product family?
Cahill: TruView is less related to social media. It is a reputation management service in the search engine space. Think of it as SEO with a very dedicated PR focus. We work with clients to optimize, deploy, and promote content that plays against or de-ranks what might be considered unfavorable by a client in a search engine result.
Seattle24x7: Getting back to Trucast, can you give me an idea of the price point you offer and the customer profile? Is it Fortune 2000?
Cahill: Where we are focused right now is on the Global 2000. Most of our clients are certainly in the Fortune 1000-2000 level where they are focused on winning not only in the PR department, but across the enterprise. Our pricing is reflective of the amount of data that we are collecting, and the number of topics we are collecting on behalf of the client. Our services could be as low as a couple of thousand dollars a month and go up exponentially from there depending on scope. Each client a little unique , so the pricing is really driven by the number of brand topics and or conversations.
Seattle24x7: Would you care to comment on the hyperbolic growth of Twitter? How has it changed what you do?
Cahill: I think that there are a number of factors that are driving social media into the mainstream as an interaction channel. Each of these things further propel brand awareness and discussion such that marketers need to be paying attention to the channel and interacting with it. In a year’s time we might not be talking about how Twitter is so special, we might be saying Twitter is just another platform, like LinkedIn or Facebook or MySpace.
One thing Twitter has spotlighted is speed. A year-and-a-half ago if you put something negative on a blog, it might come back to you within a day or so. Twitter has upped the ante. Now if I write about Alaska Airlines or Jet Blue, while I am standing in line, I expect someone to jump back in immediately. Twitter has set up a real-time feedback expectation and I think people are getting great reactions from brands who are paying attention. So I think it is actually helping brands to embrace the space, and the technology to interact with it.
Seattle24x7: How would you summarize the cost-benefit of TruCast and best practices in social media interaction?
Cahill: At the end of the day, social media is about listening to what your customers are saying, and tapping into a new channel for interaction. If companies don’t know how to do that well today with phone calls,or emails or in-store, they are not going to do it very successfully in social media because they haven’t transformed their organization. Organizations must evolve to handle the channel and the volume,or risk it backfiring on them.
An example of doing it right is Microsoft. They get the space and are doing a phenomenal job. They’ve spent the past 12-18 months laying the foundation, experimenting, understanding. They laid the foundation for how to understand what the landscape looks like so as they move further and further into this channel to do interactions, they are prepared. They have community people. They have subject matter experts behind the types of questions people ask. They are integrated with customer service. Comcast is another great example. They are deploying not just from a national perspective, but a regional one, including someone right here in Everett who is the lead for this region of Comcast enterprise. Bottom line: If you want to leverage the channel game, technology is not going to solve your problem, it’s only a piece of it. Your organization has to set the priority for social. The reality is that your customers are already likely there .
Learn more about Visible Technologies and TruCast at http://www.visibletechnologies.com
