Archive for the ‘Interviews’ Category

This interview is part of the 10th Anniversary Interview Series. I sat down with Pat Keegan, the VP of Services at Biz360, and this is what he shared with me about providing excellent customer service in a social media world.

MO: Hi Pat, thanks for joining us! Can you tell us a little about yourself?

PK: I am a proud parent.  I like sports, exercise, history, kids and travel.  I am very interested in business outsourcing.  I am also on the Board of a non-profit that supports an orphanage in Vietnam.

I spent most of my career in the telecommunications industry with experience in various engineering and services positions.  I was recruited to Biz360 by a former collogue.  It represented a significant career shift, but is something I have never regretted.

For the past five years I have lead the Services team here at Biz360.

MO: How is Biz360 of today different from when you joined?

PK: The business has changed significantly.  At one point we were focused exclusively on traditional media.  With the emergence of social media, we have adapted out technology, products and services to meet the new market demands.  The transition has been very exciting.

MO: How has your role changed since you have been here? How has the Services department changed?

PK: Well, my role has not changed too much – it involves staying focused on client requirements, building a top-notch team, and ensuring that our processes are both efficient and effective.  On the other hand, our priorities and initiatives have changed significantly.  Early on, we put a lot of emphasis on building a highly professional services team, including domestic and global partners.  This has allowed us to offer best-in-class services at highly competitive prices.   More recently we have been focused on creating a suite of new services to support the social media market.

When I first joined the company, Services was focused on application training, usage and adoption.  Since then, we have placed much more emphasis on value-creation.  We now offer a broad set of services that complements our technology and have built a flexible delivery model that adapts to our client’s unique needs.

MO: How has social media affected what clients need from their technology intelligence solutions, and how we service them?

PK: I do not believe our clients needs have changed fundamentally.  They still require information that is timely, relevant, accurately, easy to consume and insightful.  What has changed are the different business functions who now need monitoring and measurement to remain competitive.  Historically, PR and Corporate Communications teams were tasked with managing media.  Social media has expanded the number of functional organizations who need to not only listen, but engage.  Social media is now touching nearly every corner of the enterprise – from service centers to product teams and beyond.  This creates both challenges and opportunities for Biz360.

MO: What are some successes / roadblocks that you have experienced in regards to the changing media landscape, and the types of media sources we are looking at?

PK: For starters, the nature of social media poses special challenges for technology.   Social media is much more “messy” than traditional media – typos, misspelling, slang, sarcasm, etc. are the norm.  Our clients demand high relevancy and accurate metrics.  We work closely with our engineers to constantly refine these capabilities.

Content can be a challenge in this space.  Many content sources and providers have business models that are still evolving.  Some offer full access to content, some are restrictive even when privacy issues are not evident.  Some make their content easy to get, some are more difficult.  Bottom-line, it means that we must closely monitor sources of content so that we can provide our clients the most comprehensive inventory of social media content available.

Servicing clients in a rapidly expanding market is challenging, but rewarding.  Many businesses are racing to get on top of social media.  I believe that technology platforms, like ours, will prove to be indispensible.  But users have varying needs for support, and we want to be there to assist as needed.  We recently launched our new service portal and community.  We also now offer 5×24 global support to better serve our clients in Europe and Asia.  We will continue to evolve our services as the market requires.

MO: What do you think our clients will be looking for in the next year? 2 years? 5 years?

PK: This is difficult to predict since this is still an emerging market.  But I think it will be very important for us to keep pace with the growing sources of content, make it easy for our clients to adapt to the changing media landscape, and build our reputation as trusted advisors.

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The Biz360 10th Anniversary Interview Series continues as I interview You Mon Tsang, one of the co-founders of Biz360. I sat down with You Mon to talk about the company’s humble beginnings, building a killer team, following the entrepreneurial dream, persevering in the face of adversity, and predictions for the social media monitoring space. I was really impressed to hear how in spite of September 11’s aftermath and the crumbling economic climate, the early team of Biz360 literally moved mountains to close the necessary rounds of funding and close those early customers. Whether you are an entrepreneur or not, this interview (parts 1 and 2 below) is sure to move you.

As part of the Biz360 10th Anniversary interview series, I have been chatting with several long-term employees of the company, from different job functions and perspectives. Most recently, I had a chance to catch up with Eric Israel, our VP of sales. Here’s what we talked about:

MO: Eric, thanks for joining us today. Can you introduce yourself and tell us what you do at Biz360, how you got here, and why you decided to make Biz360 your professional home for the past 7 years?

EI: My name is Eric Israel, and I am the Vice President of Sales at Biz360. I am responsible for sales to new customers, as well as maintaining and expanding current client relationships. I am approaching my 7^th year with Biz360, and to this day remember the excitement I had after my interview with our Founder You-Mon Tsang. It was an easy decision for me to come to Biz360, as my background had been in large business intelligence applications and data mining. It was clear to me that an enormous value could be provided by Biz360’s solutions to businesses. I knew they (businesses) required the actionable insights that could be gained from understanding what was being said about them in the media.

MO: Thanks, Eric! Can you tell me how Biz360 has changed over the years?

EI: When I first joined Biz360, most companies were skeptical about the level of analysis that could be done with technology and software applications. I remember spending a lot of my time with clients educating them on what can be done. Most people were using samples of data vs. everything that was available to them. With the pervasive expansion of information available online, it became clear to our clients that using software was the only way to gain a competitive advantage. Today, when I speak with people in the market, they are expecting the technology to do even more than I thought could ever be done. We have clearly come a long way in such a short time.

MO: Eric, How has your role changed since you joined almost 7 years ago?

EI: The sales team here at Biz360 has seen a lot of change over the last 7 years. When Biz360 first came to market, we spent a lot of time educating the clients on what was truly available to them. There was a huge investment made in education and putting perspective around the change that businesses could make. Today the market has been educated and exposed to change so quickly. The time to market is a lot faster. The other area that has changed in a dramatic way is the content. The volumes and types content are simply staggering. What’s a Tweet? No one asked what the editorial page was or if the information was in print? We all knew. We need to help clients understand what the next Twitter will be. The sales team at Biz360 must be on the bleeding edge of these new developments.

MO: From your vantage point, how has social media affected what clients need from their technology intelligence solutions,and how we sell to them?

EI: I would say that the market’s needs fall into three main categories: Speed, Relevancy & Metrics. Social media moves so quickly that clients have to react in real time. What is hot this morning could be quite old this afternoon. On top of that, the language style that people use in social media is different from the formal writing we were taught in school. Clients want to be sure that the data they are looking at is really about them, and not erroneous content. HP does not want mentions of Harry Potter, and Computer Associates does not want mentions regarding the state of CA. When trying to understand with whom to engage, clients demand that their technology solution point them in the right direction. Clients simply can not respond to every post about them. Our technology needs to let them know when not to mind a comment because it does not matter. This is done with specific metrics around impact, engagement and tone. We at Biz360 show our clients how engaged people are in their conversation, whether or not those conversation are impactful, and what is tone is of those conversations.

MO: What do you think our clients will be looking for in the next year? What about 2 years? 5 years?

 EI: It is clear from our clients that they are looking for one platform to perform a number of functions in social media. In short, marketers need to find ways to help their business grow. At Biz360 we are showing our clients how to use social media to acquire new customers, retain the ones that they have, as well as engage in the conversation while learning about their space.  Couple that information with effective community management, customer support, and using this new channel for promotion – and you see the business flourish in social channels.  As we move further into maturity of this market, you will see social media metrics integrated with other operational metrics used to run the business. This unfiltered voice of the customer will be an invaluable part of the integrated mix model marketing that the most sophisticated companies are using today. The most exciting part is that we can get people there today!

As a marketer, oh boy do I know how things have changed! No longer do consumers listen to or watch advertisements. Directmail and mass emails get tossed into the wastebasket. Unless it’s a tailored communication or offer, buyers scoff at marketing that treats them like a number. Granularity and 1-on-1 marketing are expected more and more. And to top it off, with web analytics and measurement technologies widely available, ROI is increasingly important to quantify success of marketing programs. So how does a brand stand out? How does a brand truly develop a message, product offering and support to match evolving needs? In a space like ours, with so much data and so many smart technologies around, how do we give our clients what they need? How do we evolve our brand, while keeping our innovative DNA intact? Let’s have Tamairah Boleyn lead the way!

I caught up with Tam Boleyn, our faithful Director of Marketing. Tam lets us in on her path towards this position, and provides  commentary on how our marketing activities have changed to keep up with the changing needs and expectations of our clients.

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Ten years ago, You Mon Tsang and Dan Gartung founded a media measurement company, and they decided to call it Biz360. Boy, were they ahead of the curve! As pioneers in the space, they had to oftentimes educate their customers on measurement and tracking, why it’s important, and why they should do it.

As the years wore on, the media landscape as we know it has been turned on its head by social websites and technologies that allow us to connect and relate to others in an unprecedented way. As traditional media has evolved into this more social paradigm, Biz360 has adjusted well, by developing Community Insights, a monitoring, engagement and measurement platform. Each day, we are challenged by more and larger datasets, the growing demand for realtime everything, and the evolving profile of our customer. So we threw a 10th anniversary party to celebrate this tremendous milestone, reconnect with each other, and ponder (over cocktails of course) upon what makes us successful, and where to go from here. Here are a few words from You Mon Tsang:

Biz360 10th Anniversary Interview Series – Interview with Danielle Sherman, Account Manager Extraordinaire

Danielle Sherman understands what it takes to ensure that our clients are using their Biz360 tools to their maximum potential. She is an educator, a fixer, an interpreter of data and a “topic query whisperer”. After we sign up a large enterprise client, it’s the services team, which Danielle is a part of, which makes the social media motor hum daily.

We index such tremendous amounts of data that we want to ensure that our clients can get their hands around their very large numbers of mentions. As easy as our product is to use, our clients have been known to build some very complex topics. And that’s where we come in: from complex topic creation, to custom report generation and  social media education, our services team is here to help unlock the full capabilities of our platform.

Having come from “PR 1.0″, Danielle has a unique perspective on how social media has changed the conversation, PR, marketing, and what our clients are looking for. Take a look at her interview below:

Biz360 10th Anniversary Interview Series – Employee #1 Gavin Das

We are turning 10 this month! That’s quite a feat; most startups don’t make it past their first year. We started out monitoring traditional media, added blogs, and now fully embrace the social media world. With so much data available in realtime, the tech challenges are enormous. Being able to capture, index and filter all this data, while serving it up in a flexible interface, is not for the faint of heart.

I sat down with our engineering powerhouse Gavin Das, the guy who built the company alongside with the founders. Gavin tells us about the days of working from the founder’s spare bedroom 10 years ago, how things changed, and how Biz360’s technology helps clients measure and monitor social media. Did you know that we re-architected our system 4 times so far, to meet the demands of the ever-changing media landscape? With the team’s technical knowhow, I have no doubt we will be around for a lot more than another 10 years.