NetBase: Insight Delivered

We’re at the Millennium Broadway Hotel in New York City this week at the ARF (Advertising Research Foundation) Audience Measurement Conference, where we’re getting a lot of positive feedback from early-release users of NetBase’s ConsumerBase. In fact, I will be speaking at the show on Wednesday, June 23 at 3pmET, the topic is: Two Case Studies: How Understanding Your Social Media Audience Drives Innovation.

NetBase’s capabilities resonate especially strongly with market research professionals. Because our ConsumerBase tool can read 50,000 sentences a minute and analyze 12 months’ worth of data on demand, it can very quickly extract actual consumer preferences from millions of social media postings. Market researchers immediately discover insights about a brand and answer such questions as:

• Reasons why people “hate” and “love” the brand
• Reasons why people switch to/from the brand
• What prompts people to talk about the brand

You can read the first publicly published case study which was presented by HCD Research about a birth control product titled “Exploring the Social Aspects of Marketing Research Methods as We Move Toward the Attention Age” that was presented at a PBIRG (Pharmaceutical Business Intelligence Research Organization) conference.

We’d like to invite more market researchers to become familiar with ConsumerBase and its capabilities, so NetBase is launching a 30 Day Trial Program. 100 market researchers who qualify will be granted 30-day access to the product at no cost. Market research professionals can register by filling out this form on the NetBase website. Check the product out, and share your thoughts!

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I met last week with Jason Falls, author of the Social Media Explorer blog. He’s a smart guy and he asked some great questions about ConsumerBase. In his review, Jason wrote “I’ve been in search of something that A) Produces more meaningful information and B) Is priced somewhere other than the “are you effin’ kidding me” range.”

Jason really hit the nail on the head. He keyed in to one of our major differentiators. There is a lot of noise these days about social media monitoring. With our ConsumerBase tool, NetBase is really trying to up the ante. There’s definitely a need for monitoring tools, and especially ones that help companies communicate directly with their customers. But there is a huge hole in the market to serve market research with a way to use social media  to understand how what is being said impacts your brand. And, to make those important discoveries quickly enough that you can act on them and without spending your whole research budget. Check out Jason’s review, and let us know what you think.

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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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