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charlie
注册时间: 2005-05-24
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What bloggers think about your business
Meet an entrepreneur who can survey 20 million consumers in two minutes.
NEW YORK ( Small Business) - The blogosphere is a vast, unruly, and totally tantalizing mother lode of unvarnished consumer opinion on every product and service in the capitalist universe. But to know what the masses are saying about your product, you would have to dig through 350,000 daily postings on a staggering 20 million blogs worldwide.
Enter Umbria, a market research firm in Boulder that designs software to find useful consumer intelligence on the Internet. "The blogosphere is overflowing with brutally honest opinion," says Howard Kaushansky, Umbria's 47-year-old CEO. "Our goal is to track those opinions down."
Every few hours Umbria sends an application called a spider out over the web to scour the blogosphere for postings about the firm's clients, most of which are big consumer companies, such as Electronic Arts, SAP and Sprint. By analyzing keywords in blogs on behalf of Sprint, for example, Umbria's software can tell whether a blogger is talking about customer service, the company's advertisements, or a particular calling plan.
To figure out whether an opinion is strong or tepid, the applications knows that "awesome" is a stronger endorsement than "pretty cool," and that "shoddy" is less damning than "abominable," thanks to several employees with Ph.D.s in linguistics and artificial intelligence.
Kaushansky claims his software can even identify sarcasm, a useful skill in the prickly blogosphere. It can also estimate the author's age and gender. Elongated spellings ("soooooooo"), multiple exclamation marks (!!!) suggest a teenage female. The blogger is probably a teenage boy if a posting is rife with hip-hop terminology such as "aight" (translation: "all right") and "true dat" ("I agree!").
The twenty- and thirty-somethings are more likely to use complete sentences. These men tend to favor vivid adjectives such as "sordid" and "hilarious," while the women favor elaborately emotive turns of phrase, such as "wishing I could just crawl out of my skin" (a real example). Male baby-boomers, on the other hand, tend to favor stale hip-hop-isms such as "jiggy" and "bling." They also pepper their blogs with terms such as "prostate" and "IRA."
Umbria's service is fast -- spidering through 20 million blogs in under a minute. Running linguistic algorithms takes another few minutes. Then out spits an "Umbria Buzz Report" that tells clients how they are being portrayed in the blogosphere. The reports cover the overall brand experience, along with consumer reactions to specific products and even specific features of those products. Umbria also classifies all the comments by estimated age and gender, and its reports always reproduce a few of the juiciest blog postings verbatim.
Bloggers are often early adopters of products and services, and they tend to be more fervent and expansive in their opinions than the general population. Clients say Umbria's service helps them discern attitudes that may not show up for months using traditional market-research tools such as surveys and focus groups.
Buzz Reports are also useful for gathering intelligence on competitors. Izze Beverage, a 45-employee Boulder company that makes sparkling fruit juices, recently engaged Umbria to track what bloggers were saying about rival brands. When a blogger had a bad fruit juice experience with one of his competitors, the result was often a profane online rant. "We want to make sure that never happens to us," says Izze CEO Todd Woloson. The company recently hired a customer relations specialist that it hopes will soothe angry consumers before they take to their blogs.
Kaushansky, a former lawyer who worked at several small data-mining companies, founded Umbria in 2004. He has raised $6.75 million for the company, mostly from venture capitalists. Kaushansky projects that Umbria will generate $2 million in revenue this year and will turn a profit in 2006.
Umbria is a relatively small player in the $20 million blog research market, with a 10 percent share. Principal rivals include Cincinnati-based Intelliseek, which controls about a third of the market, and BuzzMetrics in New York, which does not disclose revenues. Unlike Umbria, the latter two companies also meet with clients to interpret the data and suggest strategic responses. "We rely on both technology and humans for analysis," says Max Kalehoff, marketing director for BuzzMetrics. "Umbria takes an extremely automated approach."
But automation keeps Umbria's services affordable. Its clients pay roughly $60,000 a year, while the fee for one of its rivals can easily run into the seven figures. Kaushansky intends to maintain Umbria's low-cost and no-consultants strategy. The company's next frontier: algorithms that will classify bloggers by ethnicity, location, income, social class and level of education. As a white, female, middle-class, college freshman living in Akron might say, that would be soooooo cool!!!!!!!
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How it all started for the biggest and brightest
BONUS SECTION: SMALL BUSINESS
Starting a business: What it takes
How it all started for the biggest and brightest
Business plans should be simple, passionate
A leap of faith: From employee to start-up
How some of the world's top entrepreneurs got their starts:
Oprah Winfrey, 52
While just 19, the media-mogul-to-be co-anchored TV news in Nashville. Her career took off when she launched The Oprah Winfrey Show in 1985 in Chicago. Her empire now includes production of movies and TV specials and magazine publishing, all part of Harpo Inc. (That's Oprah spelled backward.)
Sam Walton, died at 74
Variety store owner Sam Walton opened his first Wal-Mart discount store in Rogers, Ark., in 1962, using 95% of his own money. Just five years later, Wal-Mart's five stores brought in sales of $12.6 million. Walton died in 1992.
Richard Branson, 56
Virgin Group began in 1970 as a mail-order record company when Branson was just 20. He has built it into a holding company with interests in more than 200 businesses ranging from a music label to an airline to hotels and movie theaters. Branson courted success early with his brash style, quick decision-making and risk-taking. One of his first hit groups: The Sex Pistols, a group other labels wouldn't sign.
Martha Stewart, 64
The domestic diva developed her cooking, gardening and home-keeping skills while growing up in a family of six in Nutley, N.J. After a short career as a Wall Street stockbroker, Stewart launched a catering company in 1976 that became the springboard for her first book: Entertaining. Martha Stewart Omnimedia, her company, produces magazines, TV and radio shows, and markets home furnishings.
Warren Buffett, 75
Buffett was 25 in 1956 when he founded an investment fund with $100 of his money. It later bought a small textile company called Berkshire Hathaway. Buffett pulled Berkshire out of the textile business and remade it as one of the world's top investment companies, the owner or investor in successful companies such as Geico insurance, Dairy Queen and Coca-Cola. The "Oracle of Omaha" is the world's second-richest person after Bill Gates.
Google guys
Google co-founders Larry Page, 33, and Sergey Brin, 32, met at Stanford, where they started a project that analyzed the "back links" pointing to websites. After brainstorming ideas in their dorm, writing up a business plan and maxing out their credit cards buying computer memory, they persuaded investors to sink $1 million into their idea. The massive search site launched in 1998.
Bill Gates, 50
At 13, he programmed computers. Before he left Harvard in his junior year, he developed the programming language BASIC for the first microcomputer. He and childhood friend Paul Allen next started the software company that grew to dominate the computer business. Long before it turned 30 last year, Microsoft made Gates the world's richest person.
Robert Johnson, 60
After a brief stint as a cable industry lobbyist, Robert Johnson used a $500,000 investment from cable titan John Malone in 1979 to create an outlet aimed at African-Americans. Black Entertainment Television made its debut in 1980. In 1983, it began a 24-hour schedule, with 7.6 million cable subscribers. BET was the first black-owned firm on the NYSE.
Source: USA TODAY research by Kelly Barry
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