Sign up now for the complimentary August 24 webinar to get the results!

Want to know what separates a successful VoC initiative from one that returns just so-so results? We did, too. That’s why Attensity sponsored  a new voice of the customer (VoC) survey titled “Voice of the Customer: Data-Based Analysis of Adoption and Optimization of VoC Initiatives.”

The survey, conducted by Esteban Kolsky, founder of ThinkJar, offers a comprehensive look at the key factors determining the success of enterprise VoC deployments.

Kolsky will host an Attensity-sponsored webinar on August 24th to discuss the results of the survey. Webinar registrants will be provided with complimentary access to the full report.

To register, visit: www2.attensity.com/vocsurvey.

Nearly 400 respondents in marketing, customer service and other organizations were surveyed across a variety of industries, including finance, insurance, retail, technology and travel. The results were not necessarily what he expected to find.

“There seems to be a lot of confusion in the market as to what makes for a good VoC deployment,” says Kolsky. “We found plenty of myths, old wives’ tales, and friend-of-a-friend accounts, but we wanted to take a look at those accounts from a statistical perspective. We discovered some very interesting results.”

Some of ThinkJar’s findings include:

• Having a clear VoC strategy proved more important in justifying VoC initiatives than showing measurable ROI.
• Many organizations either fail to recognize the value of the VoC information they have collected, or fail to understand what it says.
• The top reasons for VoC initiatives were to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty, while “listening to the voice of the customer” was a lower priority.
• The use of enterprise feedback management tools was low, while the use of analytics tools was far more advanced than expected.

We here at Attensity are basking in the reflected glow from the media coverage of Capgemini’s recent announcement of its new Social Media Management (SMM) service. The announcement, which introduced Attensity as Capgemini’s technology partner as part of their BPO service and Systems Integration practice, was covered by BusinessWeek, the Financial Times, B2B Magazine and InformationWeek, to name a few.

Of course, we are excited that Capgemini, one of the world’s foremost providers of consulting, technology and outsourcing services, chose Attensity to provide the customer analytics and engagement technology platform for the company’s new SMM solution. But more important to us than the media attention is the new capability the Attensity partnership with Capgemini brings to our enterprise customers.

With Gartner predicting spending on social software to support sales, marketing and customer service processes to exceed $1 billion by 2012, the market is definitely ripe for this kind of solution, with lots of different competitors  jumping into the waters.

So what makes the Capgemini/Attensity social media offering unique?

In a word, process. At Attensity, we have long said that in order for social media to deliver value to enterprise customers, it needs to be tied to a business process. Capgemini’s SMM service is being delivered by the company’s Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) group, and will enable enterprise organizations to make use of its vast experience in customer insight management together with its process management expertise. The service is part of a wider drive from Capgemini into the social media space and complements Capgemini Consulting’s social media solution called ‘Social Insight into Action’. This solution provides consulting expertise to transform a business’s systems and processes, turning the insights from social media monitoring into actions that include operational improvement, process redesign, customer segmentation strategy, social CRM strategy, multi-channel strategy and actual engagement strategy.

By combining Capgemini’s process powerhouse with Attensity’s deep expertise in customer analytics and engagement, companies will be able to make their social media initiatives not only practical and cost-effective, but, dare we say, even profitable.

That’s why companies like Brown-Forman (makers of Jack Daniel’s) are calling upon Capgemini to help monitor, analyze and provide insight into new product launches across various social media channels and platforms, including Facebook and Twitter. In fact, Capgemini has already delivered successful pilots and early stage programs of Social Media Management with 20 customers across telecommunications, gaming, manufacturing and the consumer goods sectors.

Paul Cole, vice president for BPO Customer Operations at Capgemini, says that: “Most businesses recognize that social media has the potential for generating tremendous value for the business; be it for marketing, sales or customer service, yet many are unaware of how to best use their company’s assets to effectively operate within this channel. By partnering with Capgemini, companies have access to the latest and most impactful technologies as well as immediate access to skilled social media advocates. As a result, they are able to respond, in near real-time, which ultimately can lead to actions that improve the bottom line.”

We couldn’t have said it better ourselves.

Guest post by Jordan Hubert, Sterling Communications.

Unsurprisingly, Stone’s July 7 death after falling over the railing at Rangers Ballpark while attempting to catch a ball thrown into the crowd was met with the highest chatter on social media sites of all dates within the last month. The next highest peak occurred – again unsurprisingly – on July 11, coinciding with the Carmickle incident and Major League Baseball almost seeing another man fall from the stands. To make matters worse, just as baseball’s most social fans were beginning to shift their discussion away from spectator safety, a light bulb is shattered at Tropicana Field, sending glass to fall into the stands and igniting the most recent peak in social media chatter on the danger at ballparks. 

More surprising, on the other hand, are the top sources that Attensity360 highlighted. The results using Attensity’s solution showed that the online sources covering most of the news about baseball spectator safety and Stone’s death have come from national sites and such regions as Boston, instead of Texas, the home of Stone and Rangers Ballpark. One could argue that there may be less online presence for Texas news outlets, but it is apparent that this is becoming a much larger story and one that is being discussed and covered not only by Texans, but all Americans.

 

So, how has the MLB responded to this obvious concern from fans nationwide? When asked in a recent conference about deeming the railings “adequate”following a similar accident almost exactly a year ago, Rangers owner Nolan Ryan responded with “No comment.” (For those who read my last post on tainted spokespersons, you know how further damaging a “no comment” can be.)

To be fair, this is nothing new in baseball, as the MLB has consistently adopted a culture of silence, particularly with the steroids incidents of years past. And, until stadiums adopt stricter regulations on railing height, fans need to act more cautiously in the stands. However, that doesn’t stop me from applauding the Rangers’ best PR move to date following the Stone incident: On July 19, the Texas Rangers announced they will raise the height of the safety rails at Rangers Ballpark, and will also install signs reading, “Do not lean, sit on, or stand against rail,” on the railings in front of all outfield seating and on all upper-level seating. Hopefully, other ballparks across the nation will follow suit, and we can go back to a time when the biggest threat to fans was the price of food!

Jordan Hubert can be reached at jhubert@sterlingpr.com. Follow Jordan on Twitter @jahubert.

Photo credit: Andy Menarchek via Flickr

Tweetbombs, Googlebombs and Politics

When I got into the office Monday morning, I started my daily social media review and happened to notice a lot of very similar tweets on the subject of “text mining” by different TwitterIDs sharing very similar bio photos. Later that day, a colleague sent an article on “Twitter bombing,” titled how ”Cyber Attacks May Have Affected Massachusetts Senate Election” by P. Takis Metaxas and Eni Mustafaraj at Wellesley College, Mass.  

Research by Metaxas and Mustafaraj shows that the Tweetbomb attack on Martha Coakley in the 2010 Massachusetts elections was undertaken by the same group that attacked John Kerry in 2004.  Metaxas describes Twitter-bombing (not yet defined in wikipedia.org) as “creating a large number of Twitter accounts and sending a large number (in this case, about 1,000) of Tweets within a short period of time”. The tweetbomb of 185,000 messages sent by 40,000 users reached an audience of 60,000. But there were 10 users sent between 512 and 1024 messages EACH!

A similar phenomenon called the  Google-bomb, not surprisingly, refers to “practices, such as creating large numbers of links, that cause a web page to have a high ranking for searches on unrelated or off topic keyword phases, often for comical or satirical purposes” (definition from Wikipedia). Tweetbombs make for viral/trending tweets and Google-bombs make for high rankings.

Tweetbombs and Text Analytics

As for the higher than usual flurry of “text mining” tweets via TweetDeck, I noticed that a lot of them were very similar even though the Twitter ID of the person posting them was different (see chart below). There were some similarities in the Twitter IDs, too. Connecting the tweet back to the tweeter was based on visual confirmation alone - the similarity of the ‘tweeters’ avatars.

 Note that this flurry of tweets contained no links and created no effect on a Google “text mining” alert, nor did it impact the first page of a Google search. I’m wondering if the tweeter is performing research of her own!

Going back to the research by Metaxas and Mustafaraj, it is also noteworthy to mention that they have written a great paper explaining their work in more detail (From Obscurity to Prominence in Minutes: Political Speech and Real-time Search).  They contend that the introduction of real time search in the major search engines means that there is “disproportionate exposure to personal opinions, fabricated content, unverified events, lies and misrepresentations that otherwise would not find their way in the first page, giving them the opportunity to spread virally.”

The researches collected 185,000 messages from Twitter containing the keywords “Coakley” and “Scott Brown”. Some 41% of these messages were retweets. Some users posted over 1000 tweets each! Metaxas and Mustafaraj determined the political orientation of these users by reviewing their bios and messages (manual) and by searching for phrases showing sentiment (automatic).

I think that Attensity’s text analytics technology could be employed here to replace the manual effort to automatically identify common contextually related keywords and come up with overused phrases (excessive retweets).

Googlebombs

In order to increase higher search engine rankings, users also employ a technique known as the Google-bomb or Googlewashing. Here, users create large numbers of links, that cause a web page to have a high ranking for searches on unrelated or off topic keyword phases, often for comical or satirical purposes – and in the case of the political elections, they associate an obscure, negative term with a public entity.  Negative language and entities has text analytics written all over it! 

Accounting for Crowdsourced Fraud

Deep natural language understanding is absolutely vital to automatically and accurately identifying negative comments and ensuring they are kept separate from the positive ones. As more of the general public weighs in on local, state and national elections, searching and manually identifying themes and patterns from the comments will become prohibitive.  Text analytics offers the ability to capture these trends automatically and provide a variety of  integrated reporting and dashboarding options such as side by side displays of positive vs. negative comment frequencies, trends of tweet counts over time, identification of “hotspots” (trending topics and themes that are statistically significant), tag-clouds of contextually related keywords and phrases, and much more! The over-representation of tweeters/blog posters and tweets/blogs/comments is a very tangible problem.   This new crowdsourced fraud can be identified and accounted for using text analytics, allowing companies to capture the signal from the noise.

Photo credits: busyPrinting – drop tweets not bombs

With Google opening up a large number of invites to Google+ this week, the conversation surged about this new attempt by the Internet giant.  I created a login and had a look, like millions of other Google users in the world. It’s Google, so many of us will try. 

The second or third to market sometimes does well, sometimes doesn’t, it’s about circumstance.  Heck, Google was NOT the first search engine, but they ARE the best today. Google does have a lot of information about me and my networks to possibly make Google+ useful.  Through Gmail, they have my address book, for a while there, they could get at my Facebook friends (Facebook put an end to that -Facebook has just shut out Open X-Change tool designed to transfer Facebook friends to Google+..)  And of course, I “visit” Google everyday as my chosen search engine.

Facebook was at least second to market (MySpace being 1st) and as we all know – that worked well. The difference?  Broader appeal. While MySpace appealed to the teenage and music loving crowd, Facebook got us all through Universities and our desire to voyeur into the lives of people we went to school with, or work with, etc. 

I remember years ago setting-up my Linked-In profile thinking this was a pretty neat online resume and way to find people. When Plaxo came out and I started to get invites to join it and people started to connect with me on it, I thought, I already set-up my online resume and I can find people professionally just fine with Linked-In. I am not doing this again with Plaxo. A lot of people felt the same way – as proved by their comparable user bases. 

So is Google+ to Facebook as Plaxo is to Linked-In? It’s hard to tell. So now that we’ve all invested all this time in Facebook, finding friends, joining communities, linking our favorite online games to our Facebook profiles, setting up the Twitter feed, etc.  Do we want to do it again with Google+? They are surely making it easy to set-up.  Right when I clicked on my invite, I got a list (and all I had to do was check-all) to invite people to my network. It’s still new, but when I looked at my list, only 4, out of my over 500 person gmail address book had already signed-up.  So far, I have been waiting to spam my whole inbox with invites to Google+, but maybe I will. The question is – how many social networks can one have?

Here’s what some of the analysts in and around the social and Internet space think so far (these are taken from Twitter):

• Michael Fauscette (IDC and one of the smartest guys in the tech analyst world): Google Plus: Is This the Social Tool Schools Have Been Waiting For? - http://rww.to/jvk5Kd
• Ray Wang (CEO Constellation & All Knowing Tech Analyst): Need 2-way on #tweets using #google+ as a client for me to be a full convert. #socbiz #scrm #googleplus #collab#e20 ; Head’s quite dizzy with the feeds from #googleplus #google+ on one screen and the #twitterstream on another. #book manuscript in middle!
• Jacob Morgan (Chess Media Group): Google + to me has the same value as chatter does. It’s basically a customer version of chatter for asynchronous
• Curt Monash (one of the most clever guys in the DBMS space) isn’t sure yet: So will we all move soon to Google +? I haven’t looked at it at ALL yet (don’t even have an invite).
• Nick Patience (451 Group):  Dipping toes into Google+, liking them circles so far
• Esteban Kolsky (my favorite analyst and skeptic) : can we leave all the “google+ is going to take over the world” predictions for 6-12 months into the future? we need to see it work first
• Katie Boehret (WSJ Tech Writer): Confused about Google+? You’re not alone! Here’s my explainer column & video http://dthin.gs/oMYQIV
• 50cent (ok, he’s not an analyst, but he does have 47M+ followers on Twitter): Who on this new google+ sh*t. Add me on there https://plus.google.com/u/0/114809488257853535663/

The general buzz has a lot of neutral content. When I pulled the neutral comments out – you can see there are a bit more negative than positive comments. Mostly related to it being yet another social network and people still being skeptical about the value.

Of course, Google is hyping it – all over – here’s their blog which counts the user growth: https://plus.google.com/117388252776312694644/posts/1k85ZNPCu1A   With one of the broadest access to people online, it is not surprising that Google is getting people to give it a try. I agree with much of the commentary, though - let’s wait and see. Have found your CIRCLE OF FRIENDS yet?