Jonathan Carson sounds very excited.
In an email he sent to “key stakeholders in the marketing industry” this morning the CEO of BuzzMetrics announced news that VNU, the majority stakeholder in his firm and the owner of well-known research services like ACNielson and Nielson Media Research would unite BuzzMetrics and Intelliseek to create the crown jewel of measuring consumer generated media, a term coined by Intelliseek.
VNU’s new measurement service will be branded Nielson BuzzMetrics. A standalone site is planned at www.nielsonbuzzmetrics.com. VNU is also the publisher of BillBoard and ADWEEK, and is the majority shareholder with 50.1 percent ownership of the new rollup organization.
What does this deal mean for advertisers looking for good predictors of growth? Yoda of Star Wars fame might say: “Humm… future is very uncertain. Patience must you have.” Solid advice and we need to give the new organization time to work it out. If anything, my hope is this that this announcement will provide emphasis to the fact that marketing research is a needed key step in all word of mouth marketing models.
During the company’s webconference, I submitted this softball question related to growth prediction:
This is Todd Tweedy with WordSpreadsQuickly.com. The team has certainly done a fantastic job in communicating how you’ll mine the pulse of what customers are talking about using your content discovery and text-mining technologies but can you share more information on how this information is a good predictor of growth?
The moderator spun the question into a more process-focused question related to what a research engagement would look like and the respondent noted things like “see, observe, and witness” and finally sharing “we’re going to get a lot better.” It would of helped to hear how they intent to interpret ratings and or survey data to tell businesses what to do. But again, it’s too early to be judge and jury.
As one might expect, there was a lot of positive spinning going on during BuzzMetrics webconference that sounded more like a dress rehearsal for a future VC road show. Regardless, I was left with the impression that Nielson BuzzMetrics is likely going to move away from simple aggregation reporting of data samples related to content and information distribution and associated consumer generate media/content about a product or service to a more sophisticated analyses in the future, however it is very unclear how BuzzMetrics will take information from what they are calling the “world’s largest focus group” to provide good predictors of growth to advertisers.
So how will this need offering drive business success? A member of the new executive team hinted at a potential archival system which I’ll predict will assign purchase intent or advocacy rating that may include measures by category by brand by product by season by social network by lifepoint and so on, and so on. Think Internet Way Back Machine meets database marketing 101. I’ve my hunch is right I think it’s it a smart move. Since everyone seems to have a search engine of one sort or another creating a new “Internet monitoring” offer for blogs and boards as the core service would likely fall flat on it’s face.
This archival management machine that BuzzMetrics may attempt to develop is also exciting because it’s exactly what researchers and great marketers tell their clients to do themselves: append this information to your customer database; deepen your relationships; and, act on the new knowledge. I’m still pondering whether or not a third-party can cost-effectively provide this service and the needed flexibility to give advertisers a meaningful voice in the relationship that BuzzMetrics would own. That might be a bit difficult to swallow for most advertisers.
Honestly, you don’t need to spend millions of dollars on someone else’s focus group to gain valuable insight rather you need include marketing research steps in your own word of mouth marketing model so that you avoid repetitive problems associated with word of mouth practices.
VNU has been quickly shoring up it’s investment in word-of-mouth research and measurement over the past year starting with their acquisition of Trendum, an Israeli-based media and linguistics analysis technologies provider in February 2005. Then VNU’s Trendum acquired BuzzMetrics in September of last year and embraced the name of the firm as their own.
As for the future, I feel the new Nielson BuzzMetrics company is going to operate like a JupiterMedia-like analyst organization with a twist of TribalVoice, Everyone.net, and YoYodyne.
Final Thoughts
BuzzMetrics’ announcement is certainly exciting but will it be compelling to organizations seeking to launch word of mouth marketing programs? It’s clearly too early to tell but in a recent meeting I had with a movie studio VP this person indicated the last thing they needed was more research. Leading me to think that if BuzzMetrics can package bussiness growth success and not just more research their future looks very promising.
Here’s a link to the official press release at BuzzMetrics
TAGS: word of mouth, VNU, buzzmetrics, intelliseek, nielson buzzmetrics, marketing research, Jonathan Carson
2 responses so far ↓
Administrator // Jan 17, 2006 at 5:37 pm
Justin Kirby, co-Editor of Connected Marketing had this to say:
It’s interesting to see how some of the higher profile players in the nascent buzz ‘monitoring’ market are already consolidating at a time when new players are entering the market like moths to a flame. Consolidation sure makes a good PR story when faced with increasing competition in what is still a small pond. But will consolidation or early mover advantage count for much in this space if Google decides to enter the fray and potentially offer similar services for free. Or what happens if IBM get a bit more PR savvy and show how they can also measure the buzz bottom line rather than simply monitor customer conversations.
I’m fascinated by all the hype surrounding the buzz monitoring market and the new metrics being bandied about, but can’t help being reminded by a point made by Dr. Paul Marsden at the London School of Economics in the Connected Marketing book we co-edited:
“How do you truly measure word of mouth online? Unless you know whose opinion actually has any influence at all, all you are measuring is simply chatter at best and noise at worst.”
Or as veteran reporter John Lawton once said: “The irony of the Information Age is that it has given new respectability to uninformed opinion”. Monitoring this opinion does not make it any more uninformed!
carson // Jan 17, 2006 at 9:42 pm
Thanks for the nice write up Todd, and for a very interesting analysis.
Clearly, assigning a deeper set of metrics to consumer-generated media is our big idea here. Our goal is to add a level of depth to buzz analysis which will do a few things: a) allow marketers to assess CGM/buzz as part of their overall measurements of the media landscape, b) provide norms and benchmarks which give marketers better context as to what their buzz analysis “means”, and c) ultimately, begin to tie buzz in as a data point in the models they use to evaluate satisfaction, predict sales, identify problems, etc.
It will certainly be a challenge to accomplish all of this, but with a ton of experience doing this type of analysis for clients already, some really cutting edge technology, and the backing of a pretty important strategic partner, we feel like we are very well-situated to tackle it!
More soon…
Jonathan
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