Transcript: Marketing Voices: Nielsen Buzzmetrics' Pete Blackshaw

This transcript is from a PodTech.net podcast at:
http://www.podtech.net/home/technology/1629/pete-blackshaw-of-nielsen-buzzmetrics-back-by-popular-demand

Guest: Peter Blackshaw - Nielsen Buzzmetrics
Host: Jennifer Jones - MarketingVoices

Peter Blackshaw - Nielsen Buzzmetrics
I think that this whole notion of listening is so powerful, but it's not just listening for listening sake, it's a listening to help us become better, smarter marketers. It's listening to help us become more consumer centric. It's listening to help make sure that we don't jump over the cliff. It's listening to make sure that we have radar to guide those critical decisions that we need to make when ROI is still important.

Anchor
This is PodTech.net, welcome to MarketingVoices, featuring the fresh perspectives of innovative marketing leaders and examining how social media is changing marketing throughout the world. Here's your host, Jennifer Jones.

Jennifer Jones - MarketingVoices
Hi, this is Jennifer Jones, and today on MarketingVoices I have a repeat guest who came back by incredible demand, and he was very generous to spend some time with -- or is very generous in spending some time with us today, and it's Peter Blackshaw of Nielsen Buzzmetrics. He's CMO there, and his Podcast is one of my most violently downloaded Podcast on Marketing Voices. He is going to talk to us today about the latest and best practices in Metrics, and just so all of you know that, Nielsen Buzzmetrics was just nominated by Forrester Researchers -- spoken about by Forrester Research as the leader in brand monitoring and measurement, and they're really the global measurement standard in consumer generated media. So, I feel very fortunate to have Peter back on the show again today. So, Peter, thank you so much for coming and joining me on Marketing Voices.

Peter Blackshaw - Nielsen Buzzmetrics
Thank you very much, they must have the wrong guy if they're downloading my last Podcast.

Jennifer Jones - MarketingVoices
No, believe me it is -- it's like 2X, what some of the other ones are. So, to that point, what are sort of the latest and hottest trends and practices in the measurement of consumer generated media today that you can share?

Peter Blackshaw - Nielsen Buzzmetrics
Oh, yeah sure. Well first of, the space continues to evolve and more often iterate, which is partly what makes it so darn exciting, and with every evolution the stakes are higher and higher from marketers, because what we have is consumers are embracing a more diverse and powerful range of megaphones to talk about all manner of issues and brands are implicated. So, what we're trying to do -- just for perspective, Nielsen take a 51% interest in a rollup of a number of companies, and we've been trying to mash up the two capabilities, the costumer sets, the technologies and we are -- and it's coming together really, really nicely, and we're now starting to develop scalable set of metrics that will be largely reflected in syndicated reports. There'll certainly be some ongoing custom work for key clients that have very unique needs.

The way we're thinking about it is, our core metrics and measurements are very much at the heart of our value proposition and competive advantage. We're providing metrics that provide standards, norms and benchmarks for clients that are looking to measure their own brand and see whether they fit in the larger category or industry context. We're very, very sensitive to this emerging need by, especially the CMO to measure with ROI precision, the talked value. The nice thing about CGM unlike offline word of mouth is that, it's highly measurable. I mean you can really quantify all these different data sources and look at different things so as we develop our product development roadmap, we think about metrics along the following lines.

We have what we call attributes, then we have formal metrics, and then we have what we call scores. The attributes are things such as where we might take a cluster of commentary and break it into specific issues. If I'm looking at -- electronics, for example, is our biggest category, and you might look at -- an attribute might be something like the specific issue where they're talking about costumer service or where they're talking about billing or some other pain point. Attribute might also be the source. Was it from blogs, was it from message board, was it from Usenet, was it from YouTube, was it from some other area? It might be the segment; the segment is the specific audience that you're looking at. The segments are really interesting because we now can take our range of data and boil it into life stage segments, segments that loosely represent different demographics, so frankly I think the bigger idea is segments by lifestyle and influence versus demographics.

We'll look at things like polarity, which is positive or negative, or type of emotion. We all know from marketing that emotion, hierarchies of emotion typically lead most brand strategy documents, and that's typically, you're trying to hit certain emotional attributes in your media spend and in your messaging.

Then the metrics get into issues such as -- so those are attributes, and on the metrics side, you might get into the things like volume, share, favorability, depth of influence, we have something we call dispersion, which is very interesting, especially on the crisis management side, which is to what extent did the negative commentary jump the shark or jump to fence to multiple boards. Some conversation tends to jump to a multiple message boards.

Then we look at things such as engagement, which has become a really big term in the industry right now, probably a little bit over hyped, but I think it does reflect the deeper level of involvement.

Then the third category, as though that's not enough, we would call -- but no, we take this very seriously, because marketers are really pushing us hard for frameworks to analyze okay, what is success, what's failure? Then we're getting into what we call scores, and this is where the marriage with the Nielsen network is getting really interesting, and it's partly what makes my job so interesting to wake up to everyday. This is where we might look at things such as a CGM SiteScore which is, to what extent does your Website positively impact conversation, to what extent -- things like buzz GRPs or Blog rankings scores or something we might call the CGM Service Track, or we might look at to what extent does your customer service contribute to positive or negative CGM. In some cases we might just look at CGM in isolation, but often we'll start to take other data sources and blend it into the mix. So, the next time you interview me, I'll probably be talking a lot about how our latest score integrated Nielsen Media Research Data or Nielsen NetRatings Data or ACNielsen Shopper data into the overall mix, and we're just starting to get into that. I personally find that really, really exciting, because I think marketers can really relate to the full holistic integration of these different data sources.

Jennifer Jones - MarketingVoices
Oh my God, it is amazing, but this is all software based, obviously very data analytics, I mean you're talking about Fortune 500 companies, what does a company who really can't afford to do it your way have to think about? Do you feel like these kind of segmentations are as key to them as they would be obviously to a Coke or a Toyota?

Peter Blackshaw - Nielsen Buzzmetrics
Well, the good news on the Internet, I do think there is a beautiful feedback loop that's readily available to all. I mean clearly there're some levels of depth and rigor that you can't get into through free and readily available tools, but in some cases you can get the 80 for the 20. I mean think about it, you and I are bloggers, and we can certainly exercise great feedback loops to figure out how we're doing with some degree of granularity. I think there's a lot of entry points for people to start to figure some of this out, and I think generally the nice thing is, even with some of the readily available low cost or free tools, you start to find that online analytics provide a higher level of accountability and measurement than a lot of the offline tools that we've used in the past.

It really does well measure, and obviously we take it to a much deeper level. The nice thing about our levels, we can actually go back three years or so and really look at a much, much broader volume of data and track over time, but absolutely. In fact, a lot of -- honestly a lot of our clients start -- they start on training wheels, and they'll use the readily available tools and then they'll get a little bit addicted to the measurements and they're going to say, we want more. We actually use Blog Post pretty aggressively as a product development tool, because we have so many people that use it for free, we are glued to how people use it, what aspects of interface design did they find sticky and useful? I mean think about it, if you're going to charge clients for a paid tool, you certainly want to get some good data in terms of how people really find the usefulness of certain applications, and you're always humbled by the data.

We've learned, for example, that profiles is a pretty big deal. People really do like to understand a Bloggers profile, which intuitively makes sense, we want to understand influence. So therefore based on that data, we may dial up our commentary in our analysis with clients around influence, or we may dial up the way we develop our next generation reporting interface or paid interface based on some of those insights.

Jennifer Jones - MarketingVoices
Right. So what about measurement of Podcast, what are you doing in there at this point, is there anything that's (Voice Overlap)?

Peter Blackshaw - Nielsen Buzzmetrics
Well, I put that in the category of CGM squared or consumer generated multimedia. You can do things like presence tagging, where you know in the context of the CGM that there is an audio file of some sort. There's certainly software out there that can translate the Podcast and then basically apply the same Text Mining Technology that we apply. We're just flirting with that right now. I wouldn't say that's the biggest demand area with our costumers. We're applying the same thinking to the areas of video, we're just starting to get into ranking video's, you can actually get a very early sense for that on Blog Polls, we're now ranking videos, but we'll take that to a much deeper level, but definitely a bit more, I mean to get to your -- the quick answer, a bit more challenging than text analytics, but certainly well within the realm of possibility as more software is popping into the system. It probably would be premature for me to say anything beyond that, right?

Jennifer Jones - MarketingVoices
Right.

Peter Blackshaw - Nielsen Buzzmetrics
We definitely have a lot of engineers tackling a lot of these emerging issues.

Jennifer Jones - MarketingVoices
Well let's consider that sort of a lead into maybe our next interview. Okay, so switching gears here now, you blogged a lot about these listening centered marketing?

Peter Blackshaw - Nielsen Buzzmetrics
Yeah, definitely, I mean its interesting, I'm always trying to think about frameworks that people can relate to and don't unnecessarily silo themselves into legacy thinking, and this is the notion of, is it research that we do, is it next generation measurements? I think that this whole notion of listening is so powerful, but it's not just listening for listening sake, it's a listening to help us become better, smarter marketers. It's listening to help us become more consumer centric. It's listening to help make sure that we don't jump over the cliff. It's listening to make sure that we have radar to guide those critical decisions that we need to make when ROI is so important.

So, I think that what's so powerful about listening today is not only monitoring CGM, but I think there's going to be a whole rebirth and thinking around Customer Relationship Marketing. I mean right now if you think about it, listening is generally treated as cost interactivity. In fact, if you could go and you look at feedback forms for most Fortune 500 companies, it's still very much in the attention, reduction category, whereas most marketers are hemorrhaging all this cash on trying to acquire attention. I think what's going to happen is, we're going to see this powerful convergence where marketers, in addition to monitoring Blogs and message boards and forums, more marketers are going to focus on their own direct feedback pipe, and they are going to listen attentively to their most vocal consumers, and they're going to capitalize that in a very big way.

The big bonus there is that -- and we know this from tons of research that we've done is that, the same consumers that tend to open up and talk to companies, whether positive or negative or just offering suggestions, are the same consumers that are disproportionately represented on Blogs, message boards, forums, ratings and reviews sites, and definitely on YouTube. I think that what marketers are going to need to really crack the code on is how do we open up our listening pipes, so that we are conversationally conversant in the same way that these consumers talk externally.

So, for example, it's easier to post a Nastigram related to a company on YouTube than it is to send it directly to the company. It's much easier to post a photograph implicating the company on Flickr, WebShots, or all these other sites than to send it directly to the company, and this is where we need to reengineer the way we think about CRM. So I think that listening centered marketing is basically saying that listen, the future of marketing is all about how we develop both offensive and defensive radar in understanding what consumers are saying to guide better decisions, and ultimately win consumer loyalty, because consumers today are definitely rendering judgment on companies based on the extent to which they respect their voice, they think about it.

Jennifer Jones - MarketingVoices
We see it a lot, and my biggest thing about all of this is, all these marketers that we deal with, or many of them I should say, have such a fear factor for doing exactly what you're saying, and it's like I try to get them to the point where we discuss it to just realize that they've got to jump in and just start doing it, but so many of them are afraid. So how do you get them over that fear?

Peter Blackshaw - Nielsen Buzzmetrics
I actually think it's less about fears than legacy processes. I think if you really do a systematic analysis of Fortune 500 companies, you will find that the people that manage the listening pipe are divorced from the people that buy the marketing activity.

Jennifer Jones - MarketingVoices
Very astute of you, that's really -- you probably (Voice Overlap).

Peter Blackshaw - Nielsen Buzzmetrics
No, no, I mean think about it, who is CBO (ph) and all the CRM System, they're not serving the marketers, they're serving operations. The economics, go to their Website, read that literature, it's all about attention reduction. How do I minimize time with the consumer, how do I minimize contacts? That is an operations principle that basically says this is cost center not profit center, and meanwhile you've got just tons of money being pumped to word-of-mouth marketing and find me the influencers. I started the Word-of-Mouth Marketing Association, they're up to 400 people and everyone's lathered up about advocacy, but no one is thinking about it in the context of the most critical component, which is -- I don't want to say categorically, there's some companies, but by and large, very few people are thinking about advocates in their own backyard, everyone wants to find them externally. Part of the issue is that nobody wants to disrupt, it's almost -- it's more friction free to go to an agency and say find me influencers than to try to knock on the consumer of various department and say, hey, let's meld our organizations together.

Jennifer Jones - MarketingVoices
So, have you...

Peter Blackshaw - Nielsen Buzzmetrics
This is what companies funded -- companies need to think about CGM as an energy source to bring that unity, and stockholders and shareholder value will be tremendously served by that, because right now there is tremendous discontinuity and inefficiency in the siloed structures.

Jennifer Jones - MarketingVoices
Wow, very powerful. So who is doing it right in your opinion?

Peter Blackshaw - Nielsen Buzzmetrics
Well, I think everyone who is beginning, whether they're using our firm or our competitors, whether it's Brand Dimensions or Symphony, or even doing some of the stuff on their own, I think the companies that are tapping into the consumer voice are beginning to make those critical connections. One of the things that's so cool about our job is that, we'll typically start by selling directly to the brand manager, and then a couple of months into the engagement, the researchers start knocking on the doors and saying, we need to see those reports, and then consumer knocks on the door and says, we need to see those reports, and it's funny, I've been in meetings with Fortune 500 companies where people have said to me, it wasn't until you came here to do this report that we all saw each other.

Jennifer Jones - MarketingVoices
Oh my gosh.

Peter Blackshaw - Nielsen Buzzmetrics
So, I would say, let's working. I think the process of listening -- I mean listen, there's nothing like the energy that throwing the consumer on the table brings.

Jennifer Jones - MarketingVoices
Yeah, no kidding (Voice Overlap).

Peter Blackshaw - Nielsen Buzzmetrics
There's nothing like the power -- listen, I romanticize the power of Systematic Analysis, but there is nothing like the power of an individual story to motivate a CEO.

Jennifer Jones - MarketingVoices
Yeah, because that's where -- like in focus groups in the old days where people -- you'd have CEOs go in and watch these focus groups through one way mirrors, and they'd start jumping up and down in the room. So that's what you're doing, yeah.

Peter Blackshaw - Nielsen Buzzmetrics
No, exactly, I mean consumers are an energy force and people are very self conscious about how consumers feel and think about them, it's just that they don't necessarily have a real lens into those thoughts and reactions. I think that as we see more transparency in the marketplace. that is to say financial analyst are now dipping into consumer opinions about brands, product launches and the like, I think there's a much higher level of sensitivity about how consumers react.

Jennifer Jones - MarketingVoices
Gosh, you're right. Well, I think we could go on for hours, but I think this has been very provocative. So, thank you so much Peter Blackshaw.

Peter Blackshaw - Nielsen Buzzmetrics
Thank you very much for inviting me.

Jennifer Jones - MarketingVoices
This is great, so this has been Peter Blackshaw, who's the CMO of Nielsen Buzzmetrics, and this is a really standard, goal standard measurement company, excuse me, excuse me. Well, it is really...

Peter Blackshaw - Nielsen Buzzmetrics
Listening centered marketing.

Jennifer Jones - MarketingVoices
Yeah, listening centered marketing, I was going to say, that's what we talked about before the interview.

Peter Blackshaw - Nielsen Buzzmetrics
No, we're officially a research company.

Jennifer Jones - MarketingVoices
I know, but as we said, research is always sort of one of those words that people always think negatively about, it's kind of like PR and real estate. So anyway, the bottom line is, thank you so much, I really appreciate it.

Peter Blackshaw - Nielsen Buzzmetrics
Thank you, congrats on all your success, keep Podcasting away and we'll mail the measurement standard next time we talk.

Jennifer Jones - MarketingVoices
We really need help with the measurement on Podcasting. So, to all the MarketingVoices Community out there, until next week, thank you so much for listening, and may all the voices you hear be MarketingVoices.