- WHAT DOES BUZZANALYTICS PROVIDE THAT
IS DIFFERENT FROM TRADITIONAL MARKET RESEARCH, PUBLIC OPINION, COMPETITIVE
INTELLIGENCE, PUBLIC RELATIONS FIRMS, AND CLIPPING SERVICES?
- WHAT PRECISELY IS WORD OF MOUTH (WOM)?
- WHAT IS CONTENT ANALYSIS AND WHY IS IT A CRITICAL TECHNOLOGY?
- WHAT KINDS OF ON-LINE MEDIA ARE MONITORED?
- YOU USED THE TERM "SPECIAL COLLECTION OF SITES;" WHAT DO YOU MEAN BY "SPECIAL COLLECTION"?
- WHAT IS YOUR VALUE COMPARED WITH MORE TRADITIONAL METHODS USING SURVEYS, QUESTIONNAIRES, AND FOCUS GROUPS?
- WHAT ARE THE KINDS OF SERVICES YOU OFFER?
Our approach is different enough that many of the types of firms mentioned above are our customers. We provide our highly tailored intelligence reports to them to support their clients.
The way we are different is that we apply methods and approaches similar to those used by national and military intelligence agencies. A number of our staff posses Department of Defense Security Clearances enabling them to undertake highly classified work.
We focus on employing trained intelligence professionals to work with our computerized scanning tools and employ methods, similar to those used by the world's intelligence agencies, to monitor and track opinion and sentiment on Internet media - - - in over thirty languages and nations around the globe. In reality, we become your in-house intelligence agency.
Our development team has ties to the university research community, and has attended universities including Harvard, Princeton, MIT, and others. This team has a strong background in Business, Opinion Research, Mathematics, Computer Science, Physics, Artificial Intelligence, and Organizational Theory. Thus, we link highly skilled intelligence collection, analysis, and opinion professionals with exceptional scientists and engineers that are leveraged through collaborative efforts with the university research community. This unique combination results in highly tailored and customized reports and deliverables that really make the difference for our clients.
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"Word of Mouth" was really the first form of advertising - - - literally, getting the word out. With the internet, it has taken on a new importance and is sometimes referred to as Internet or "On-Line Word of Mouth." That's where the on-line community discusses issues, products, political candidates, television shows, brands, entertainers, movies, and just about anything on the billions of Blogs as well as sites related to news, advocacy, consumer interest, magazines, chats, and a host of others. In essence, the global on-line community never sleeps and is generating virtually billions and billions of highly opinionated lines of text daily.
"Word of Mouth" is only one of the many types of content media on the Internet monitored by our intelligence professionals.
While "Word of Mouth" is today's "hot topic," (it even has its own association); an older and slightly outdated term, still used occasionally, is "Consumer Generated Media" (CGM) that goes back to advertising terms used in the early 1950's. It covers approximately the same areas; however, some consider it to be a component of "Word of Mouth."
This valuable on-line information is geographically distributed, chaotic, highly unorganized and exists in more than thirty languages and many more nations. At BuzzAnalytics, our trained intelligence professionals operate highly sophisticated proprietary computer tools that are similar to those used by intelligence agencies around the world to carefully scan, monitor, analyze and piece together the puzzle - - - fusing the chaotic information into meticulously tailored reports crafted specifically to meet the demanding business intelligence needs of our clients.
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Content analysis began during the Second World War for processing war intelligence. Manual processes were developed and used by US and British intelligence agencies to analyze the content of German newspapers and radio broadcasts. The technique was employed with striking results to track what was really happening in Germany during the war. Information on trends concerning opinion, technologies, topics of interest, morale, loyalty, and politics was secret; however, by carefully analyzing the media American and British intelligence tracked what was going on in the hearts and minds of the Germans. Since content analysis was all done manually and on a daily basis, the work was highly tedious, repetitive, expensive, and required an army of analysts working around the clock.
BuzzAnalytics has automated and expanded the technique by scanning Internet media and employing machine intelligence-based techniques similar to those used by intelligence agencies to track public opinion, political and social issues, emerging technologies, television audience preferences, and identify trends early in the cycle, forecast election outcomes, develop customer loyalty metrics to predict how likely it is for a customer to switch from your product to another, and to better understand the public perception of your brand, product, issue, or candidate. Intelligence agencies and military organizations continue to use this type of content analysis; however BuzzAnalytics intelligence professionals apply it commercially for our clients to track opinion and sentiment.
As discussed earlier, the term "word of mouth" is the hot topic of the day and use as a general term to categorize the rapidly growing Blogsphere and customer advocacy sites. While critical, the Blogsphere and "Word of Mouth" are only two of the many media sources that BuzzAnalytics monitors. We work closely with clients to develop scanning and tracking strategies specifically tailored to their needs - - - we offer "universe scans" covering virtually all Internet content or finely tuned scans covering a specific country or region, ethnic group, a language or group of languages, Blogs, News Portals, specific media sites, or virtually any combination on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. Then, we transform the raw results into incisive reports and briefings on what the results mean as well as proactive tactics and strategies for acting on our findings.
The Harvester Service uses proprietary techniques to automate the entire
process by accessing electronic publications, data sources, news media,
and other time-sensitive sources of information on the web. We track the
additions, deletions, and context to provide rapid response information
on value, rankings, and mind share on brands, products, political candidates,
issues, and related concepts.
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We have the ability to monitor virtually all media sites on the Internet - - - all news sources including sites such as CNN and on-line newspapers like the New York Times, Washington Post, and others, news syndication services, radio and TV, magazines and journals, consumer sites, public and private sectors as well as NGO and non-profits, Blogs, entertainment, trade journals, and just about any Internet media, anywhere on the planet.
In addition, we monitor, special collections of sites, individual sites, or specially designed collection of sites meeting the unique needs of specific clients.
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A special collection is a group of sites that are represent a category of interest for our clients. Examples of special collections are, for example; might be 551 sites that focus on Evangelical activism, other groups might represent liberal, centrist, or conservative Republicans and the same for Democrats; other collections represent environmentalists, women's issues, Hispanic interests, Gen-X, Black interests, emerging technology, entertainment, and the list goes on. These "Special Site Collections" can be employed in ways similar to that of stratified random sampling used in survey research. While we possess the capability to extract race, gender, age, "genre" and related parameters employing our machine intelligence algorithms, it is useful to have already validated and tested collections of sites representing a wide variety of interest groups and genre.
Our intelligence professionals work closely with clients to craft custom media target lists combined with complex data mining query sets to capture relevant information important to our clients.
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We feel we give more accurate results, quicker, much larger sample sizes, and at about less than-one tenth the cost. We employ the military intelligence model for what we do because it works better.
Many feel that the older methods just do not do what they are supposed to do, and new research findings help verify the well-known fact that people hardly ever say what they mean in classic focus groups, interviews, and questionnaires. Further, Zaltman, noted business author and member of the Mind, Brain, Behavior Initiative at Harvard says, "focus groups and questionnaires - the dominant techniques in the field - are more often than not, a waste of time. Most new products are developed and launched using those techniques and 60 to 80 percent of all new products fail" People just don't say what they mean, and that's a known fact.
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It's a long list; however several representative areas include competitive intelligence applied to:
- Political Forecasting and Campaign Effectiveness,
- Issue Tracking,
- Monitoring Advertising Effectiveness,
- Brand and Company Reputation,
- Brand Value and Return on Brand Equity,
- Consumer Sentiment,
- Market Share and Mind Share Analysis,
- Marketing Effectiveness and ROI,
- Entertainment,
- Fashion,
- Music and Album Sales
- Television,
- and National Security
Often clients come to us with entirely new and interesting areas they need to track, and we help them achieve their goals.
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