Blog
NetBase Blog
One key to a great sales call is doing your homework ahead of time so that you know what your prospect’s biggest pain point or need is, then explaining clearly to your prospect how your product directly addresses that need. But how can a salesperson do research on a company ahead of time and hear “the voice of the customer” talking about the prospect’s company? By using ConsumerBase.
This is only a possibility at the moment, but imagine a ConsumerBase plug-in for Salesforce.com that enables salespeople to quickly research a prospect company before visiting. It would be like each salesperson having his or her own virtual market researcher to identify the prospect company’s main pain point in the eyes of their customers. Armed with that insight, the salesperson could cut right to the chase and make a very effective pitch.
This idea, by the way, came from Chris Gong, a member of NetBase’s technical operations staff. I’d like to thank Chris for the idea and use this opportunity to point out again that being an innovative company requires being open to innovative ideas coming from anywhere in your organization, even from people in functions apparently unrelated to the area that can use the idea. So a big thanks to Chris for thinking outside the box.
Web Marketers who are responsible for running online ad campaigns, with Google AdWords, for example, could benefit from a new way to find highly differentiated, non-obvious keywords for their campaigns.
Semantic Keyword Discovery—A New Category of Tools
I’m creating a new category of tools by calling ConsumerBase a Semantic Keyword Discovery tool to differentiate it from the existing category of Keyword Discovery tools. Keyword Discovery can tell you the search phrases people use to find products and services, as well as the search terms that drive traffic to your competitors. One example is SpyFu. A search analytics company, SpyFu shows the keywords that websites buy on Google AdWords, as well as the keywords that websites are showing up for within search results. The main value proposition is to see or to “spy on” the keywords that competitors use and improve SEM and SEO strategies based on those keywords.
Semantic Keyword Discovery is different because it finds semantically related keywords that we believe will resonate with shoppers in much more interesting ways than some of the Keyword Discovery approaches. Semantic Keyword Discovery isn’t intended to replace standard Keyword Discovery—it can serve as an adjunct, albeit a very valuable one. Standard Keyword Discovery gives you bread and butter keywords while Semantic Keyword Discovery gives you gravy. You need both.
An Example: Unexpected, Relevant Keywords for the Wii
Suppose you were a Web Marketer developing Google AdWords campaigns for the Nintendo Wii. You’d start with regular Keyword Discovery tools from Google, SpyFu, and others to get your bread and butter must-have keywords—the ones you want to advertise on to prevent your competition from doing so. But to get an extra edge, you need to find other related keywords that highly resonate with your consumers—semantically related keywords.
Here’s how you’d do that with ConsumerBase: In a ConsumerBase search on the Wii, you’d discover that Injury is listed in the Dislikes word cloud as something people dislike about the Wii (repetitive stress injury) but, counter-intuitively, you’d also discover it’s in the Likes word cloud as something they like, under the headings of stroke recovery and Wiihab. You’d find that people are using the Wii to improve coordination, for stroke recovery, and to treat Parkinson’s Disease. Drilling further into those results, and filtering the search on the word Injury, you’d learn that Kansas State researchers use the Wii to help restore soldiers’ balance after traumatic brain injuries. (For a quick overview of ConsumerBase and this process, you can watch this YouTube video.) A traditional Keyword Discovery tool wouldn’t uncover this because the relationship between Wii and Parkinson’s Disease can only be found by semantic analysis of consumer chatter in social media.
You could then use those diseases and conditions as keywords in your marketing—an insight your competitors probably don’t have and a means to direct people searching on those keywords to your site.
To give an example of a business-focused netnography done for marketers using our ConsumerBase tool, I’ve posted a recent PowerPoint of a netnography on Listerine here: Listerine Netnography
I’ll keep this post short because you can find all the in-depth information in the PowerPoint, but here’s a quick executive overview:
• The study is an analysis of consumers’ perception of Listerine. The source data is social media, that is, content on the Internet generated by consumers in Internet forums, blogs, and microblogs.
• We do a quantitative analysis of the amount of discussion about Listerine relative to other topics and consumer sentiment about Listerine relative to other topics.
• We do a qualitative analysis on overall reasons consumers like or dislike Listerine and offer key insights about Listerine consumers.
• We discover and discuss a range of business opportunities for Listerine, including introducing a Soothing Power flavor and a non-alcohol-based formula for Gen Y users (with tongue piercings), and promoting it as a toenail fungus treatment and mosquito repellent.
• Key threats we uncover include alcohol abuse and drying out the mouth.
In summary, we found that:
• Consumers most like Listerine’s germ-killing action
• The most prevalent complaint from consumers is that Listerine is too harsh
• Listerine has a tremendous number of off-label uses for personal and home care based on its efficacy
There are even some Lead User insights in the netnography, for example, the one about dissolving suboxone. (Lead User provides useful information links for those interested in academic lead user research, or interested in lead user consulting projects for firms involving graduate student training or research.)
It simply wouldn’t be possible for an individual researcher, or even a team of researchers, to find, read, understand, and analyze the amount of social media content that ConsumerBase processed to very quickly build this netnography. Netnographies like this can deliver insights into consumer attitudes and behavior, and ideas for new markets and products, that businesses simply couldn’t get any other way.
If you’re interested in talking more about netnography, pre-register for our netnography best-practices forum we’re launching in September. The netnography best practices forum can be found at http://www.netnography.com/
Affiliate marketers who want to become a “super affiliate”—one earning $10,000 per month or more in commissions—have to find keywords for their advertising programs that will bring consumers to their site. But there are a lot of merchants and other affiliates already bidding on the obvious keywords. So how do you find unique keywords that will pay off in site visits, clicks on ads and commissions?
How Affiliate Marketing Works
Affiliate marketing is a form of online marketing that uses one website to drive traffic to another. Typically, a retailer will reward affiliates for each visitor or customer brought to their site by the affiliate’s marketing efforts.
Some merchants run their own affiliate programs while others use third-party services to track traffic or sales that are referred from affiliates. For third-party affiliate management, merchants can choose from standalone software or hosted services, which are typically called affiliate networks. Payouts to affiliates can be made by the networks on behalf of the merchant.
Affiliates were among the earliest adopters of pay-per-click advertising. In 2000, Google launched its pay-per-click service, Google AdWords. As more and more merchants and affiliates bid on advertisers’ names, brands, trademarks and the keywords related to them, it became more and more difficult for affiliates to find unique keywords that could drive traffic to their site. (And from there, to the merchant’s site, thereby earning a commission.)
Finding Keyword White Space
One of the keys to getting affiliate marketing right, therefore, is driving traffic to your landing page where people can buy the products that you sell or advertise as an affiliate marketer. If you use Google AdWords, then you’re probably familiar with Google’s keyword tools that enable you to identify related keywords. But to get a lot of performance out of your affiliate marketing initiatives, you need to find keywords that no other affiliates are advertising on—you could call it “keyword white space.”
One avenue to pursue is Semantic Keyword Discovery, which is a way to find words and terms that are semantically related to the product you’re marketing. There’s a lot that the term “semantic” could refer to, so let me be more specific. A good semantically related keyword is one that’s related to the product in some special way; for instance, a term for the problem that the product solves. That way, if a consumer queries on the problem, your ad can come up as a solution. Imagine how motivated consumers would be to click your ad if they query on some medical condition they’ve just contracted, only to find that the high-end blender you’re marketing can help them cope with their new disease.
It just so happens that NetBase’s ConsumerBase product is good at Semantic Keyword Discovery. You simply put in the name of the product you’re marketing and it comes back with summaries of terms and phrases that are semantically related to the product. The semantic relationships it reveals are to keywords that represent benefits of the product, features of the product, and problems that the product solves.
Here are three examples:
• Wii—If you were selling the Wii, you could advertise on “brain injury.”
• Vita-Mix—If were selling the Vita-Mix blender, you could advertise on the unique benefit of increasing “bioavailability of food.”
• Listerine—If you were an affiliate for Drugstore.com, you could advertise on “toenail fungus.”
These are all examples of semantically related keywords we’ve discovered by running ConsumerBase on the brands listed above. For affiliate marketers, this innovative application of ConsumerBase to find keyword white space could make the difference between just getting by and becoming a super affiliate.
I’d like to thank my friends Alex Coisman and Joel Englander for introducing me to the world of affiliate marketing and helping me develop this application of ConsumerBase. Thanks guys!
I’ve been studying innovation methodologies for years. My favorites include the Lead User Method, Netnography, Open Innovation, and Disruption Theory. While each is unique, one thing they all have in common is a defined procedure for finding or handling need and solution information.
• Lead User Method has you find people with such a dire need that they actually develop their own solutions.
• Netnography entails looking for people talking online about their needs (granted, Netnography encompasses a lot more than that, but hear me out for the sake of argument).
• Open Innovation is about scouting for solutions from outside your company’s four walls.
• Disruptive Theory says that you should find a market need that’s addressed by a high-cost solution and disrupt that market by introducing a low-cost solution.
Again, all these methodologies have a lot more to them than that, but my point is they all rely on needs and solutions. This has been a driving force behind the development of NetBase’s technology: We wanted to satisfy innovators of every ilk, no matter what innovation methodology they subscribe to. Of course, if you ask me, the ones I’ve mentioned above are the best; whichever one you choose, you’ll probably need the type of need information you can get from ConsumerBase and solution information from illumin8.
But let’s put my theory to a test. Challenge me: What’s an innovation methodology you know of? Can you come up with one that doesn’t depend on need and solution information?
While meditating on the train one day recently, I overheard two guys talking. It was a happy disruption because one guy was expressing the pain that I founded my company to address. He was a business development guy working at a Silicon Valley hardware company. He was saying he liked his job, and got to work on cool new technology. But what he didn’t like was that it was one step removed from the customer, which made it difficult for him to know what customers really wanted. In Silicon Valley, finding that out is the job of product managers/market researchers.
Well, that same frustration is exactly what led me to found NetBase! When I was an young engineer at Ariba, I spent a year working on an innovative new product. But the project was cancelled and all the work that my colleagues and I had done was thrown out. It was devastating—all my professional work up to that point was just discarded. I didn’t want to see that happen again because I thought it was bad for the economy and I didn’t like it personally.
So I began researching the process of innovation with the goal of understanding it better and, ideally, finding ways to improve it. I started by examining the Ariba project and came to the conclusion that it had been cancelled because the work wasn’t related to a customer need; it was just an interesting idea. That’s when it occurred to me that the same explanation applies to many failed innovation projects within corporations: They fail when people developing products or services deep within a company aren’t connected to their customers and don’t know what their needs are.
That experience and that conclusion led me to study innovation at MIT and to found NetBase.
So now, using the ConsumerBase tool we’ve developed, business development guys can quickly and easily get a much better understanding of their customers—they don’t need to be in the dark anymore. They can source technologies and strategic partnerships with justification based on real quotes from consumers about what they want.
Going one step further, it’s worth making the point that people who can benefit from using ConsumerBase to understand consumers aren’t limited to market researchers or the biz dev people I mention here. ConsumerBase is for anyone in a company who could do a better job if they could just get a clearer understanding of what customers really want.
We’re putting together a best practices forum on netnography in collaboration with Rob Kozinets. If you’d like to be notified when it’s up later this summer, leave your email address at http://www.netnography.com. Be sure to tell us what topics you’re interested in discussing!
I had an hour to kill so I continued my research on the market for photo-sharing sites. My previous netnography of Shutterfly users One Hour Market Research pointed to a lot of complaints users have about the photo print and photo book quality. I didn’t think Flickr even had a printing option, so I expected to see a very different set of issues with Flickr.
It turns out Flickr does have a printing option, but I didn’t find any complaints about it from the user complaints I sampled out of ConsumerBase. A far different picture emerged about Flickr users—the biggest category of complaints was around functionality, which accounted for roughly half the negative comments. Since functionality is a pretty broad category, I’ve broken out the functionality complaints into sub-themes which include such notable areas as compatibility, navigation, and ratings.
When it comes to compatibility, Flickr users had a lot to say about using Flickr with Apple’s iPhone. My research went back a year, so at that point the comments were around Flickr needing to put out an app for iPhone. It looks like Flickr responded—great job Flickr! But then I started seeing some comments about not liking the iPhone app. For instance, one blogger reviewed a bunch of iPhone apps and said “I hate the Flickr app for iPhone. I usually check Flickr using Safari for iPhone” (source). Next up ought to be the iPad I guess.”
The next area Flickr users talked a lot about was ideas and issues they’re having with navigating pictures and organizing them into Flickr’s version of groups or collections. Here’s a good example of what I mean: “I really wish Flickr had more layout customization options. For example, I’d like to go through medium-sized pictures throughout my entire photostream instead of just the first page.” (source) A couple of other users on that site—which happens to be Flickr’s user forum—agreed that this would be a good feature.
I can’t say I understand what it is, but it shows how ConsumerBase allows you to research areas that aren’t familiar to you. The semantic lenses pick up on what people like, dislike, or in the case of the person quoted above, what people wish for. Our lenses literally read and parse what people are talking about and extract enough meaning that their comments can be summarized and searched easily by a market researcher.
Probably the most interesting thing I picked up on, from my perspective anyway, is a string of tweets where people were talking about wanting better ways to rate photos. Apparently Flickr only lets you rate a photo as a favorite so one person on Twitter said “I wish Flickr had a ‘like’ feature or ‘+1’ concept. ‘Favorite’ is too much of a commitment.” (source) Given my long-standing interest in group photo-sharing, I agreed.
I hope you enjoyed this brief netnography on Flickr. Flickr’s a great site, and it has some of the group sharing features I was looking for. If you’d be interested in seeing more of the data from my Flickr study, email me and I’d be happy to share it.
Our internal documentation expert, Matthew Lindgren, recently produced an in-depth PowerPoint to summarize the results of a netnography on consumers’ perception of diaper shopping at Walmart. (We did this as an example of a netnography on a well-know brand; it wasn’t done at Wal-Mart’s request.) I wanted to post a couple of slides from the presentation to show how effective they are in making it easy for anyone to quickly grasp key results.
The presentation summarizes findings, explains our research approach, defines our social media sources for consumer insights, describes the overall sentiment regarding Walmart diaper shopping, analyzes main opportunities and threats, and offers ideas for potential actions.
Here’s a sample slide from the presentation. The pie chart on the left shows all the negative themes associated with diaper shopping at Walmart, while the chart on the right drills down into the biggest negative, quality, and provides specific information on what consumers don’t like about Walmart-brand diapers.
The benefit of documentation like this is that researchers and marketers aren’t simply left with a general conclusion—shoppers are unhappy about the quality of Walmart-brand diapers. Instead, they can look at highly specific reasons why consumers are unhappy—and can analyze those reasons and develop action plans to remedy the problem.
The slide below provides further insight and information on the quality issue. Note the negative “sound bites” quoted at right—they’re the source material that generates the pie charts, they’re easy to scan, and they exemplify the kind of authentic feedback ConsumerBase gathers from social media.
By the way, a great way to find visuals that reinforce the insights in a netnography presentation is to use Google image search http://images.google.com/. We entered “leaky diaper” and found just what we needed to make our netnography presentation more engaging.
The slide below focuses on the insight that consumers have highly ambivalent feelings toward Walmart as a retailer. In both this slide and the one above, note that after presenting the insight from the netnography, we present Potential Actions the company could take to help remedy the problem.
Thanks again to Matt Lindgren for doing the legwork on this example.
This gives you a glimpse into our style for netnography presentations. What’s yours? Do you incorporate images? How do you present your information visually to make it clear and give it impact?
I’ve long been interested in the problem of digital photo sharing. Back when I was an MBA student at MIT, another business plan I worked on besides NetBase was for a photo-sharing site enabling groups to share photos after events. See, in b-school there are lots of parties, which couldn’t have been good for our grades—that’s why they call it “B” school. 
What would inevitably happen after events is students would clog the school’s email system sending each other pix. Some might try to post the photos to a photo-sharing site, but it was a mess. I imagined others would have this problem. For example, what about weddings? Don’t the bride and groom want all their guests to put their photos in one place? I thought there would be some cool things we could do to preserve photos and memories with a group photo-sharing site. Alas, I had to choose between NetBase and that other idea and thankfully I chose NetBase because I think we’ve created some pretty useful technology.
What brought this issue to mind is that I just returned from a family vacation and was struck again by how hard it is for our family to share the photos. One person says to use Facebook. But the kids in the family aren’t allowed to go on Facebook. Someone else wants to use Flickr; someone else wants to use Shutterfly. Some of us just didn’t even want to be bothered about uploading the photos. A mess. Again. Six years later. I was incredulous.
A Quick Netnography on Shutterfly
So I thought I ought to research the market for photo-sharing sites again. Why hasn’t someone implemented the idea I had in mind? I know I’d buy it. Maybe the biggest issue isn’t in fact the inability for groups to easily share photos. Maybe that’s just a niche problem. Time for some proper market research. Oh, but I’ve got a day job, I don’t have time for market research. Well it just so happens that netnography is the perfect way to do market research on a shoe-string budget, when you need answers fast and don’t have a lot of capacity. Faster, better, cheaper.
So I decided to take a look at Shutterfly, which I really like for making photo albums. I expected to see people complaining about sharing photos after events. Well, turns out I’m wrong. The difficulty of sharing photos after events did not emerge as the top issue for Shutterfly. See below for what did emerge as the top issues. There was pretty much a tie between quality, usability, and functionality. I’ve broken out the quality issue into its various sub-issues, but they mainly had to do with the quality of the prints (flimsy paper, color issues, etc.) and of the albums (bindings fall apart, bad alignment of images, etc.).
Shutterfly—Negative Themes
In my hour of research—remember all this research only took me an hour to do!—I did find one discussion of the difficulty of sharing photos after events. The event type happened to be weddings, just as I had predicted. I decided to join the forum, www.makeupalley.com, to ask the group some questions. Following on Rob Kozinets’ ethical guidelines for participatory netnography, I identified myself as someone doing research and posed some questions to the group about their difficulty sharing photos. The impression I got from posters was that they had gotten by with just creating a Shutterfly account (or the like) and giving the password out to their guests to upload photos. One person complained that it was difficult to get the guests to actually upload the pictures.
But it wasn’t a major problem. Perhaps that explains why nobody else has gone ahead with the idea. Glad I chose to build out NetBase instead To tie this back to the benefits of netnography, sometimes people say that it helps you “fail faster, cheaper.” Indeed, innovation is a game of chance so if you can lower the cost of failure, you can spend more effort on the good leads than the bad ones.
Blog
RSS Feed
NetBase Blog RSS FeedFollow Us Online!
Request Information >
-
CEO Interview
ARF Meets with NetBase CEO Jonathan Spier