Working for NetBase, a social intelligence company that helps the largest brands and agencies in the world understand what consumers are saying about them, I started wondering about Big Brother: Do consumers know we’re listening, and do they care? To answer that, we joined forces with our partner J.D. Power and Associates and surveyed 1,062 consumers across demographics—Millennials to Boomers—and asked them a series of questions. Survey Results Here are key findings from the survey, presented in an infographic: 32% [...]

This is one technique among a series I’m covering on conversation mining for lead generation. Set up a topic in NetBase on your brand and then filter the posts down to just those that express “want” or “need” behavior for your brand.  Turn on the firehose, sort by the desired time period, slice and dice by geo/gender/etc. Now you’ve got a rich source of precisely targeted leads. Thinking about your own business, what behavior would you pinpoint about your brand?  [...]

Two years ago, BYOD was just another acronym jockeying for acceptance by the technorati. Today, BYOD is a full-on phenomenon, the dominant way by which tablets like the iPad and Android smartphones like the Samsung Galaxy S are entering companies. This is happening in plain view, and with the full approval, of IT managers and CIOs. Take Cisco Systems, where employees use more than 50,000 mobile devices, all of their own choosing. Or Safeguard Properties, which is encouraging its 8,000 [...]

The positioning for Philz Coffee is all about hand-made, gourmet, and custom. The Philz site says, “If you are serious about coffee, we recommend you immediately fly down to Philz Coffee and try a cup of one of the 20 handmade coffees that 
are on the menu or get some Philz coffee shipped over to you. … Ask Phil how many times people have come directly from the airport just to taste his coffee.” OK, but there are only seven [...]

In the past, when you had an important purchase decision to make, you might have asked a friend or two for their opinion. Now, with the advent of social media, you can turn to a quarter million people and get their opinion in the blink of an eye—as long as you have sophisticated tools like NetBase’s to automatically analyze all that chatter so quickly. Here’s a personal example: When I bought my daughter a laptop a few months ago, I [...]

Do you use YouTube videos to promote your product? If so, how do you track what people are saying about them? You could search on the URL of a video, but typically the URL gets shortened when used in a tweet. And it might get shortened a different way for each tweet, so simply searching on the URL doesn’t work. But here’s what does work: Put a unique hashtag in the title of your video—like #BASSMOB in this example. Then, to see what [...]

Starbucks wants to be “a beacon for coffee lovers everywhere,” but they also want to be purveyors of “everything else that goes with a full and rewarding coffeehouse experience.” The question is, Does devoting time and energy to being “so much more than what we brew” take away focus and resources that could instead be spent on providing the best possible coffee? About Starbucks Since 1971, Starbucks Coffee Company, according to its website, has been committed to ethically sourcing and [...]

If you really love Peet’s coffee, you become a Peetnik®, and have “the freshest Peet’s coffee automatically delivered straight from our artisan roastery to your door so you never run out.” The term “artisan roastery” should clue you in to Peet’s positioning—they want to be perceived as the most gourmet coffee out there. Let’s see if consumers agree. BTW, the company has some unique job titles, like Vice President of Coffee and Director of Tea. Many people would like those [...]

This is the first in our series of netnographies on coffee brands, with Starbucks, Peet’s, and Philz Coffee to follow. We’ll have Insights for each brand, but the most complete analysis will come in the form of a summary post on the Ideal Coffee after we’ve looked at all four brands. Dunkin’ Donuts (DD) may not have the cachet of other, more upscale brands, but it offers a wide selection of flavors and blends. Many consumers who’ve done their own [...]

An eye-opening new post by NetBase Chief Evangelist Malcolm De Leo analyzes the correlation between social media sentiment and stock price for Netflix following the company’s controversial decisions about how it would distribute movies and charge customers for its services. Malcolm’s post investigates how Netflix could have used social media listening and understanding tools to avoid the strong negative reaction to the changes—or at least to react more quickly during the crisis and preserve more brand equity and stock value. [...]