As a marketer the one thing that struck me about this election was the amazing use of the Internet, Web 2.0 and Word of Mouth marketing to drive participation, interest, education and sometimes lots of mis-information.  I got emails, text messages, followed the candidates on Facebook, participated in online groups, read endless blogs, forums and tweets about people’s opinions – not just on the candidates – but on their policies, their experiences, the speech of the day, their latest nasty comments, others opinions on the comments, etc., etc.  There was never a day in the last year where I couldn’t learn from someone on the right, on the left and in the middle – and I never went to a town hall meeting – I did this all from my chair – alone – but surrounded by millions.

Writing from my desk here at Attensity I wonder how even with thousands on staff these candidates kept up with everything.  Did they have people assigned to bloggers?  People to dig through Facebook communities to understand what amounted to massive organic marketing?  Probably – and companies are doing this too.  Trying desperately to stay on-top of what their customers are saying online and even directly to them in online surveys or emails.

We applied Attensity to some of this data and could see the daily buzz on each topic that came up – the economy, the war, SNL!  We apply it everyday to product data online for large companies in the wireless telecom, financial services, retail, travel and consumer products space.  This data is only growing and the amazing use of these new media evident in the election is proliferating in business.

For businesses to get to the bottom of how their new product is doing, what customers like about their customer service department, what customers think about the competition and what the general buzz is about the brand is something that used to cost millions in market research spend.  But now it is just a matter of using a product like Attensity and taking on the simple process of listening – really listening to customers.

The candidates did it. So can you.

First, a little about me, as the Vice President of Marketing and Products here at Attensity not only do I manage our marketing (this website and other “content” about what we do) – but I also get to work with our product management team, engineers and linguists to take what our customers and prospects say and turn it into real product. 

I’ve worked in CRM and BI since 1996 and have worked with big and small companies to come up with strategies, to implement technologies and to define product.  I have to say that in all of that time I haven’t seen a more innovative product than this one.

Attensity took years and years of research in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and turned it into a valuable product that can cut through millions of words and turn them into facts that can be analyzed just like structured data (sales, inventory numbers, etc.)  We apply it to customer analytics or what we call the voice of the customer - specifically – customer feedback data found in blogs, web community forums, emails, customer service notes and surveys.  We uncover sentiment, issues, ideas, requirements and even competitive data.  We cut our chops analyzing intelligence data for the government – but I can’t talk much about that.

Anyway – I plan to post here everything from ideas and innovations from Attensity to links to articles and other content that is relevant to our space.

Thanks for checking this blog out!! Come back again soon and don’t hesitate to send us a comment.