Hearing the Voice of Your Customers in Blogs and Consumer-Generated Media
I’ve always found the areas of natural language processing (NLP) and linguistic modeling of unstructured content just fascinating, in fact analytically sexy. Taking customers’ comments that have been recorded in blogs, feedback forms, service requests, and all manner of e-mails then making sense of them using modeling approaches including NLP and all manner of linguistics is a very cool space of analytics to watch grow. In my CRM Buyer column in 2005 I write about blog mining in Blog Mining Gets Real. Since that column was written the graphical presentation of analysis and the implications for marketing strategies have matured rapidly.
It’s a good idea from time to time to check out what’s new at companies including Attensity, Cymfony, Island Data, IBM, Google’s intensive efforts in NLP in their Google Labs, and Microsoft in addition to statistical analysis vendors SAS and SPSS. There’s a group of companies also using a variety of linguistic modeling approaches to monitor brands online including Biz360, Brandimensions, Factiva, MotiveQuest, Nielsen BuzzMetrics and Umbria. Cymfony is considered the market leader in this category according to Forrester Research.
McKinsey & Company in fact recently published a matrix of how to align all forms of consumer generated media to specific marketing strategies. In the paper titled Marketing with User-Generated Content, (free registration) authors Amy Guggenheim Shenkan and Bart Sichel provide the following matrix:
The matrix provides some interesting insights from McKinsey with regard to all forms of consumer-generated media (click on the matrices' icon on the left to expand it). The pervasiveness of how much blogs forces companies to become more collaborative with their customers, listen to areas for improvement in addition to capturing ideas for how to improve customer service, and interject the voice of the customer into product development are all clear from the matrix.
The bottom line is that a strategy to capture the voice of the customer doesn’t need to be large, expensive or massive in scope – it can just start with a blog and the willingness to listen to what customers have to say.
Link (requires free registration to McKinsey Quarterly to access):
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