Graco Children’s Products Inc. is one of the best-known juvenile products companies in the world, manufacturing infant swings, baby strollers, car seats, travel systems that combine car seats and strollers, digital baby monitors and more. In October 2010, the company recalled two million older strollers—the largest recall of strollers ever—due to risk of entrapment and strangulation. In fact, Graco recalled a wave of children’s products in 2010, including 1.5 million strollers in January, for risk of fingertip amputation; 1.2 million [...]

Social media contributors agree that food and family time are the key elements of the Thanksgiving holiday—but feel very differently about them. Some like the food, but more don’t; most like the family time, a few don’t. Here’s a quick side-by-side comparison of consumer opinion on key themes. What jumps out at me? Well, surprisingly, Thanksgiving food is more disliked than liked—by a factor of almost 2 to 1—and family time is more liked than disliked—by a factor of almost [...]

As I work with NetBase customers to help them integrate social media understanding into their business processes, the question of developing trust comes up over and over again. Our customers rely on the insights that NetBase delivers—insights into consumer opinions, emotions, and behaviors—to make important business decisions. In turn, they need to trust that these insights are built from accurate, reliable data. People across the organization want to be able to answer questions like: Is social media representative of overall [...]

Today we continue our series of posts on social marketing hosted by Offerpop CMO and Evoke CRM founder Allen Bonde with NetBase Founder and CEO, Jonathan Spier.  In this episode we’ll look at innovation – and how social media understanding can streamline the product development lifecycle.  Thanks again for tuning in! Allen:  As someone who spent the first part of my career in corporate R&D, one of the aspects of communities and social media analysis that I find fascinating is [...]

Whether it’s Aunt Marsha’s pumpkin pie or the secret ingredient in your Grandma’s stuffing, we all have our own motivation for making the pilgrimage by trains, planes or automobiles to to arrive in time for the classic American feast: Thanksgiving. While I will be staying home this year and avoiding the holiday rush, I have plenty of memories of sprinting through airport terminals to make that nearly impossible connection. In honor of the impending busy holiday travel season, we used [...]

Princeton computer scientists have developed a new method to search academic journals and other collections of documents, such as websites, to trace the origins and spread of ideas. The method relies on computer algorithms to analyze how language morphs over time within a group of documents—whether they are research papers on quantum physics or blog posts about politics—and to determine which documents were the most influential. Here’s the article. (Thanks to Chris Ettore for sending me this link.) There are [...]

Net Promoter is a loyalty metric and discipline for using customer feedback to fuel profitable growth in a business. It was developed by Sametrix, Bain & Company and Fred Reichheld. Net Promoter has found that a company’s Net Promoter Score (NPS), which is the percentage of people who would recommend the company minus the percentage who would not recommend, correlates strongly to repeat purchases and referrals. NPS is calculated from consumers’ answer to a single loyalty question, namely, “How likely [...]

People shopping for a professional blender are faced with a tough decision between two excellent and very similar products, the Blendtec and the Vitamix. Judging from the dozens of articles (and even videos) on the web comparing the two, this is a choice that has true believers on both sides, and the rivalry is on the order of Mac vs. PC or Coke vs. Pepsi. I’m personally interested in this product comparison because I own a Vitamix (and love it [...]

Our fourth fall release is now live with two additional enhancements to further refine your topic queries. The first new filter option is used for brand names that are common English words. The second new filter focuses the search on posts with personal opinions and experiences.

It’s not possible for marketers to target each individual consumer, so they look for ways to group them by similar characteristics and behaviors so they can market to groups. Three different approaches to doing that are tribes, consumption constellations, and jobs-to-be-done segmentation. Identifying and Understanding Tribes J.D. Power, a new NetBase partner, is grouping consumers by tribes, then analyzing the behavior of those tribes. A June 2010 J.D. Power press release states that “J.D. Power Tribe Intelligence examines unsolicited consumer [...]