You may have read recently that media analysis firm Cymfony was acquired by TNS Media Intelligence. On the heels of Nielsen’s acquisition of BuzzMetrics/Intelliseek last year and Forrester analyst Peter Kim’s recent report on the brand monitoring space, I believe this is further validation of our business and the growing need of companies to understand what their customers are saying about them, their competitors, their products and key trends driving the market. This event underscores the value that technology can bring to the rapidly changing environment of media analysis.

I agree with Peter Kim that the brand monitoring space is just starting to heat up. We are continuing to see the integration of traditional & social media analysis services with core marketing activities. Our partners, like LexisNexis®, are also seeing an increase in the rate of adoption.

Biz360 will continue developing powerful metrics that help our clients accurately measure both traditional and social media as well as the relative weights of the various influencers. Our recently announced MediaSignal™ for blogs extends our weighted-reach metric for traditional media to a collection to over 32 million blogs. Combined with our tone analysis offering, Point-of-View Sentiment®, which combines the best of human intelligence and automated technology, we’re able to provide clients with positive, neutral and negative impressions of their brands, spokespeople, messages, market issues, trends, etc. across print, online and broadcast news and social media.

As more companies adopt these services, I believe it is essential to be able to provide them with standardized metrics that can be applied across a variety of media types. Accurate and broad measurement of media coverage and tone analysis across traditional and social media formats is essential to the rapid adoption of brand analysis and monitoring services. It is also important that the metrics be easily comparable to other marketing metrics.

Recently, we brought on a new CMO, Tony Priore, to pave the way for more exciting product announcements this year. What kind of announcements? You’ll have to wait and see, but you can be sure we’ll make good use of our existing assets and continue to stay focused on increasing the efficiency of market intelligence.

Our experience shows that the line between what is traditional and what is social media will only become more confusing in the future. We are here to assist our clients in decoding this ever changing world of media.

While it had a strong Nov. 14th launch, Microsoft’s Zune has failed to maintain the momentum it created that week. Information Week reported Tuesday that Zune had 9% of unit sales and 13% of revenue during its launch week, but that it was still far behind iPod sales, which accounted for 63% of unit sales and 72.5% of revenue that same week. Zune also failed to touch the iPod on Amazon’s top sellers list - it rarely made the list at all this holiday season.

The buzz Zune created in the market has been largely around its potential to be the ‘iPod killer.’ Zune rarely earned exclusive coverage and has been evaluated, in most news articles, based on how it compares to the industry-standard iPod. This is typical for a new entrant to a market with such an entrenched leader, but it means that establishing its own identity will take time. The chart below shows only a small blip of exclusive coverage for Zune (not shared with the iPod) during its launch week.

Microsoft will have to change the public’s concept of a portable media player to beat the iPod in the long run. But, in the short term, it will first have to prove that it’s an equal substitute. This may be why Microsoft officials have said they are satisfied with initial results of Zune sales that seem to only scratch the surface of the market.

Beating the iPod also means that Microsoft will have to beat iTunes. MediaPost covered a Hitwise report today showing a 413% increase in iTunes store visits on Christmas Day. This represented a 110% percent increase over the previous year and placed iTunes fourth on the Hitwise retail index. Zune Marketplace was nowhere to be found. This is likely due to the relatively low amount of coverage it received compared to iTunes.

Does this mean that Zune and Zune Marketplace are destined to meet the fate of others who have tried to knock Apple off its digital music throne? Not necessarily. But it does suggest that if it happens, it won’t be a quick hit, but rather a slow etching away of its market share. All of the players in the space lose points in eyes of consumers for issues like digital rights management (DRM) that limit the way someone can access and share music. Until one provider develops a digital music solution that allows anytime, anywhere access to music on consumers’ terms, the playing field could still change.

For more analysis on Microsoft Zune, please click here to visit our Industry Reports section.

I attended the annual WOMMA Research Symposium
today in Washington D.C. and had the opportunity to listen to and talk with some of the leading thinkers on word of mouth marketing. What became clear over the course of the day is that there’s a lot of good research on how word of mouth (WOM) works and how to measure individual campaigns, but the industry is looking for more guidance on how to sell WOM to senior management to secure budget, how much budget to put toward WOM in an integrated campaign and how to compare WOM metrics and results to other marketing metrics.

Research from Ed Keller of the The Keller Fay Group reminded us that the majority of WOM is still happening offline (90% if I recall correctly). Still, there’s strong and growing demand to measure what’s happening online. This is partly due to how fast the channel is growing and partly because technology makes the job much easier than it’s been in the past. Forrester’s Peter Kim led a panel to discuss the reasons why. It included six of the seven vendors from his Brand Monitoring report - Maxine Friedman (Brandimensions), Max Kalehoff (BuzzMetrics), Howard Kaushansky (Umbria), Jim Nail (Cymfony), David Rabjohns (MotiveQuest) and myself.

While not everyone agreed on the importance of measuring traditional media to understand how word of mouth is generated (a position Biz360 supports), we all agreed that technology is an important enabler for making sense of social media - the millions of thoughts, ideas and creations posted to the Internet everyday. Human analysis remains an important component, however, for understanding the finer nuances of language (Biz360 uses machine-learning techniques that rely on regular human analysis and input to take technology as far as it will go). The session ended with vendor recommendations on what questions companies should ask themselves before investing in a brand monitoring solution. A few of the top questions were:

• What are my program goals?
• What resources do I have internally to support a monitoring/measurement program?
• What level of service (involvement) do I expect from the vendor?
• How confident am I in the vendor’s ability to deliver insight, not just data?
• How frequently do I need information and to what depth?

There were several great presentations over the course of the day. Jim Nail presented research on the word of mouth of cereal brands, which he confessed was not an exciting topic and didn’t generate a lot of content. What I found interesting though were the motivational categories he used to break out the WOM - health & wellness (Wheaties), parental (Cheerios), nostalgic (Count Chocula), etc. Biz360 conducted similar research on yogurt brands and also found a relatively low level of social media content (yogurt isn’t nearly as exciting as Paris Hilton or Nintendo Wii, so we weren’t surprised). What we did find was that the health-based messages appearing in social media were coming from the health & wellness publications. This is a good example of how traditional media can drive word of mouth. Companies looking for word-of-mouth influencers only among consumers are stopping short of their ultimate goal.

For the full list of today’s presentations, check out WOMMA’s Web site. I believe you can also order audio recordings of the presentations after the event.

How many criminals does it take to steal McDonald’s brand? A trick question you say…

McDonald’s has built one of the world’s most durable brands around efficient, consistent and low-cost food. People save time and money going to McDonald’s - and they know what to expect from the experience. Of course, four men robbed a McDonald’s in Lauderdale Lakes, Florida, last Saturday by gunpoint providing an experience far beyond expectations. At other locations, you might have a McDrug Deal, get carjacked in the parking lot and or shot on your way home. The security at a high school in Philadelphia can monitor the McDonald’s across the street. Why? Because you might be shot at McDonald’s for showing disrespect (this one happened in London, so it’s not just us, but it may be Western culture’s own brand of extremism).

It’s not just in the news. Bloggers are talking about these things. So much, in fact, that blog posts on crime at McDonald’s outweighs conversations about its breakfast menu (there is some overlap though, like this blog post talking about someone who was run down in a McDonald’s parking lot after eating breakfast there).

Share of Key Issues and Messages for McDonald’s
3 Months of Blog Postings

And while analyzing the Blogosphere is a great way to get a sense of public discourse, there’s nothing better than good old-fashioned news media to pinpoint where the problem areas are (this may change soon, if geotagging takes off).

Top Publications Covering McDonald’s and Crime
3 Months of Media Coverage

But don’t expect local issues like crime to stay local. A local news attack at a Grand Prairie, Texas, McDonald’s was posted to You Tube where it was viewed 3,685 times in the four months between when it was posted (8/2/06) and when I checked it today. And it doesn’t stop there. Bloggers, like Dread Egos, post the You Tube video to their blog. A Google search for “McDonald’s” and “sucker punch” turns up 32,600 results. That’s not many compared to the 16,900,00 results that come up for McDonald’s, but “McDonald’s” and “crime” turns up 1,750,000 results (NOTE: the actual search results for McDonald’s, the company, would be less than a pure “McDonald’s” search and the content having to do with crime would be greater than the results from a simple “crime” keyword search).

Since McDonald’s is everywhere and crime is everywhere, you have to expect this is going to happen from time to time. But, is there any brand impact? And what could McDonald’s do about it? Knowing that it’s a topic of discussion greater than many of the products and messages being promoted is a big red flag that you might need to take action. Using local PR strategies to balance out negative perception is a good start, but in world connected by social media, that’s not enough. In the absence of a full-fledged corporate strategy to minimize crime at the stores, going beyond messaging to show some level of action is always ideal (in-store metal detector perhaps, remove shoes, toss liquids…).

I looked for some research on this topic and found a great article on the impact of corporate crimes, but not on the occurance of crimes during the brand experience. I’d like to conduct a study to find out what percentage of people who have experienced a crime at McDonald’s first hand will no longer eat there. Then ask the same question to people who heard about a crime from someone else? What’s the fall-off rate as you add more degrees of separation. You would have to take into account the number of times someone has heard about a crime, over what period of time and whether the negative impact was per location or at the brand level.

Ultimately, you could figure out the ripple effect of each crime and how many it would take to significantly impact McDonald’s brand. Then you could answer the question - how many criminals does it take to steal McDonald’s brand?

The Forrester Brand Monitoring Wave that we mentioned last month was published today and is now available for purchase. The Biz360 summary is available here. It’s the deepest dive into our space to date, and we’re hopeful that the increased attention will benefit the industry as a whole, especially those of us who were selected for the review.

Overall, analyst Peter Kim rated Biz360 as a “Strong Performer.” From the executive summary:

The vendor offers a strong, end-user-focused brand monitoring solution with good coverage of data sources. The company’s Market360 product features a powerful and flexible user interface with broad reporting capabilities. Biz360’s presence in analytic and consulting services is small but growing, making the solution a better fit for companies that seek a self-service tool.

The report includes more detail regarding our flagship product, Market360:

Biz360’s user interface provided the most in-depth functionality for client-side use. The ability to construct queries, reports, and alerts, as well as tuning and filtering sources and speaker sentiment, are provided in a user-friendly Ajax-based interface. However, empowerment comes with a downside: Some clients report that the system’s complexity makes it easy to miss some of the functions that are available for use.

The complexity criticism is fair, and one that we’ve heard from some of our users in the past. In an effort to help our clients to realize as much value as possible from the application, we just conducted an extensive round of customer feedback interviews. Based on this feedback, further usability enhancements are in the works. Here’s what we currently do to help users on this front:

• Build customizable dashboards that can incorporate all of the reports our customers need on a single home page.
• Offer alternate delivery options, including periodic email, email alerts, offline reports, and RSS.
• Provide personal assistance through our account services and technical services teams.

The Forrester report also evaluated our services capabilities:

The vendor offers training opportunities on par with other vendors. Biz360 is building consulting services capabilities, but these services are still nascent.

On this point, we respectfully disagree. Our consulting services team is small, true, but it consistently generates very high rates of satisfaction and loyalty among our current customers. Our services strategy involves not only building a top-notch internal staff, but also partnering with external consultants for targeted strategic engagements. Combining the power of our application with the insight of expert media analysts has led to some of our most compellling client success stories.

A couple of our competitors secured higher overall ratings in the study. Congratulations to Cymfony’s Jim Nail and Nielsen BuzzMetrics’ Pete Blackshaw, both of whom are recognized as industry thought leaders. We can thank them for leading effective marketing campaigns which have increased awareness for this space. With our own brand and thought initiatives like MarketIQ and key executive positions filled, we plan to be in the leader category when the next brand monitoring wave rolls around in 12-18 months.

On August 15, 2006, a media flurry began when Dell announced it was recalling 4.1 million laptop batteries manufactured by Sony, the largest safety recall in the history of the consumer electronics industry. Overheating batteries have been causing laptops to catch fire or explode. The following week Apple recalled 1.8 million laptop batteries, also made by Sony.

Seeing two of the industry’s most polar-opposite brands pulled into the same debacle made us wonder how the media treatment would play out. We looked at the tone and visibility of Dell and Apple’s battery woe media coverage and noticed Dell had far more visibility and negative tone than Apple.

Media Coverage by Tone
Dell and Apple Battery Problems, August 2006

MediaSignal^TM is calculated by adjusting the reach number for each article based on how prominently the subject (Dell/Apple) is mentioned and then adding together the adjusted reach numbers for each company’s total base of news articles. This chart is based on 6,986 online, print and broadcast news articles for Dell and 5,270 for Apple. Green corresponds to positive MediaSignal, blue/gray to neutral and red to negative.

One reason for this discrepancy in tone is that Dell was first to recall the Sony batteries and in that initial burst of coverage, Apple came forward to say that it was looking into the matter and examining its own Sony laptop batteries. Was it Dell taking a proactive lead on critical safety issues? Engadget and other blogs had been following the saga laptop by laptop, calling it to Dell’s attention. If you take a look at discussion of Dell and battery problems in the Blogosphere, the writing may have been on the wall for awhile.

Newscycle Report
Blog vs. Media Coverage for Dell Battery Problems

The chart shows the media coverage in volume (blue) over time compared to blog posts (gray) over time for discussion of Dell and battery problems.

InfoWorld reported that Dell and Sony knew about the problem as far back as 10 months ago. According to one Slashdot comment, Dell registered www.dellbatteryprogram.com on 11/10/2005, possibly anticipating a recall. One thing is certain though - with upwards of 50 millions blogs containing the personal experiences of millions of people, there’s no need to wait for customers to come to you. Public information on the Internet is often a better source of data for understanding your customer’s experience with your product.

Forrester analyst Peter Kim offered this update today on the Forrester Brand Monitoring Wave being published in September. Biz360 is one of a handful of vendors being evaluated in what will likely be the most in-depth review of our space to date. I can’t say much about this while the review is still in progress, but I’m confident the attention from Forrester will help marketers understand 1) the importance of monitoring brands across new and traditional media channels and 2) the differences between the service offerings available.

Setting the stage for this Forrester Wave, Peter recently published his views on Reinventing the Marketing Organization (July 13, 2006). One premise of his piece is that large media buys are becoming, and will continue to become, less effective for generating brand loyalty and revenue. He recommends starting to move those dollars toward technology investments that help marketers 1) understand customer preferences better and 2) create more meaningful experiences for customers.

Note the movement of money bags in the chart above from large media buys –> customer-centric technologies, including brand monitoring. Who knew corporate vaults still had Scrooge McDuck-style money bags?

Source of graphic: Forrester’s Reinventing the Marketing Organization by Peter Kim, published on July 13, 2006. To purchase the full report, click here.