In The News

What's All the Fuss About "Engagement"?

July 1, 2008

There has been a lot of recent talk about "Engagement." Engagement is the new metric for social media, the measure of success for social media marketing. But what is engagement? As soon as social media started to change the way people communicate and share interests, values or concerns, it became a gold mine of customer intelligence and insight. The key to unlocking this intelligence is to understand engagement.

Engagement as the Measure in Social Media

June 4, 2008

Social media is a gold mine of customer intelligence, if you have the strategy and tools to understand the insights. The key to unlocking this intelligence is understanding engagement. Measuring social media also can unlock innovative approaches to marketing, media, product development, and overall customer relationships.

Customer Driven Market Research For Growth and Profit (podcast)

June 4, 2008

RSS Ray speaks with Dan Neely about customer-driven market research, using tools like social media, web analytics and customer intelligence to help grow profits and lifetime customer value.

Riding the Groundswell of Social Media (podcast with Charlene Li)

June 2, 2008

Have you read “Groundswell?” Author Charlene Li talks about Social Media tactics in a conversation with Paul Dunay. Right now, your customers are writing about your products on blogs and reediting your commercials on YouTube. They’re defining you on Wikipedia and ganging up on you on social networking sites like Facebook. These are all elements of a social phenomenon — the groundswell — that has created a permanent, long-lasting shift in the way the world works. Most companies see the groundswell as a threat. But you can see it as an opportunity!

Customer Service 2.0: Clients become brand managers

May 28, 2008

Companies must listen and respond to customers in a Web 2.0 world or risk losing them to those that do. For example, The Artful Home, which sells art and other home decorating items, significantly changed the content on its Web site based on user suggestions. By monitoring the number of customers participating in specific discussion topics and analyzing the content they posted, the company found that they are mostly interested in how to use the products they buy in design and decorating projects. The company gained an understanding of the desires of its online customers by using Networked Insights to analyze the content posted to its eight-month-old online customer community.

Community 2.0 Podcast

May 14, 2008

In this podcast conversation, CEO Dan Neely explains why companies using social media and building online communities should focus on “passion and pain points.” Dan recently led a session at the Community 2.0 conference called “Customer Engagement: The New Metric and What it Means to Your Business.”

Low-hanging fruit can feed brands well into the future

April 16, 2008

The research reveals that early adopters are implementing social media in their organizations at a rate 500% faster than wait-and-see marketers. “The ultimate value for a company is the low-hanging fruit areas,” says Dan Neely, CEO of Networked Insights. “For a company like John Deere, a community is just a means to an end—a way for them to understand what’s going on inside the community they serve, to make the company more efficient,” he says.

To unite workers, companies start their own web-style networks

April 14, 2008

With social networking sites booming in popularity, especially among the younger set, the corporate world is following suit, creating internal networks for employees modeled on Web communities. Companies including IBM, Best Buy, Xerox, Dow Chemical and even the buttoned-down accounting firm Deloitte have introduced networks.

Networked Insights allows social data mining

March 31, 2008

The Networked Insights program can now mine third-party social networks, such as MySpace and company-branded portals, for consumer data. Users can see information on customer behavior, sentiments and engagement in real time.

Social Media Analytics Tool Enhanced

March 27, 2008

Recently launched Networked Insights — which gathers customer intelligence from social networking sites — has upgraded its Customer Insight Platform to provide a real-time window into customer behaviour.

Service aims to mine social networks for consumer insight

March 26, 2008

Networked Insights crunches social network data to draw insights into factors ranging from its customers’ brand recognition and reputation to a user’s relative influence.

Hosted tool helps companies study online opinions about products, services

March 26, 2008

A new hosted service launched today will allow companies to glean “customer intelligence ” from content about them posted by their customers across various social networks along with the responses to that content. The new Customer Insight Platform from Networked Insights Inc. uses natural language processing to measure customer interaction and engagement on company-operated online communities and on social networks like MySpace.

Networked Insights: A peek at social-media analytics

March 26, 2008

Earlier this week I spoke with representatives from Networked Insights, a Madison, Wisc., company that tracks social network data and works it into analytics and “customer intelligence ” for clients. It’s a niche that might raise a few eyebrows for its watching-your-every-move nature, but let’s face it — there are search analytics and blog analytics, so we shouldn’t be a bit surprised that social network analytics are starting to take off.

Networked Insights Boosts Its Customer Insights Tool

March 26, 2008

Networked Insights today announced a new level of functionality to the Networked Insights technology platform. Companies will be provided with a deeper level of customer intelligence mined from interactions across all social media applications, including the lion’s share of third-party social networks.

Build Your Research Network Before You Need It (podcast with Dan Neely)

January 14, 2008

I spoke with Dan Neely, CEO of Networked Insights and an advocate of customer-driven market research. I got a chance to ask him how customer-driven research works and how the best companies are taking themselves out of the center of research efforts and putting their best customers there.

Market Research for Small Businesses

January 10, 2008

Dan Neely, Networked Insights’ founder, says companies value being able to gather information directly from their communities. “It’s not just small businesses, but businesses all over are looking for tools to let them do the research themselves,” he says. The online community provides that tool, he says.

Forrester issues market research predictions for 2008

January 4, 2008

Forrester projects that traditional market research firms will suffer this year as more large companies move market research in-house using do-it-yourself technologies.

What Have You Learned From Your Community Lately?

December 28, 2007

Here’s the key point that I learned from Dan: Do you want a community for “community sake” — because everyone else is doing it? Or do you want to really engage and learn from customers and are going to use the community as a platform to do so?

How to Use Social Media for Search Engine Optimization

December 4, 2007

Social SEO — tapping into how [customers] talk about you and your industry so that you can determine how they will search — is the most effective and foolproof way to master that art/science/guessing game of picking keywords.

Movable Type’s New Publishing Platform: Does It Need Ad Options As Well?

November 3, 2007

We’ve seen with Networked Insights how this level of social media engagement and interaction can be used towards market research, and in turn utilized for improved ad networks.

Artful Home Mines Customer Forums to Decide Web Strategy

November 21, 2007

[Networked Insights] is like walking into a room with 500 of your customers sitting together and listening to their conversation. What a gift that is.

Move from Eyeballs to Interactions

November 19, 2007

As new web technologies continue to add an element of participation and influence for web users, a new metric is needed to encapsulate how people’s discussions and communication with each other is affecting your brand, and ultimately, revenue. This new metric is interactions.

The New Focus Group

November 15, 2007

Being able to capture all of these discussions and mine them for meaning make them potentially more powerful than any focus group.

Community Powered Market Research

November 8, 2007

Startup Networked Insights has launched a new online platform for building community around brands, with the twist that the conversation are automatically mined for market research data.

Networked Insights Offers New Internet Market Research

November 7, 2007

Networked Insights thinks it can do a better job of measuring public opinion than traditional companies like ACNielsen, by leveraging the Internet’s crowd power. If true, the decades-old market research industry could be in for a shakeup. The company has just raised $4 million in financing.

Networked Insights launched with $4 million capital investment

November 7, 2007

Networked Insights, a new market research firm, has formally announced its company launch along with the closing of series A funding of $4 million from Kegonsa Capital, a Madison-based venture capital firm.

Social Network Boom Fuels Research 2.0 Initiatives

August 28, 2007

Networked Insights is named one of two new companies that are taking advantage of social networking technologies to enhance consumer-based research.

Firm to Offer Research Gained from Social Networks

August 24, 2007

Networked Insights offers real-time market research gathered through social networks for consumers. Having raised $1 million in capital, with commitments for another $4 million in preparation for its website launch in September, Networked Insights is poised to be the leader in next generation marketing research companies.

Socialize Your Site for Better Insights

August 16, 2007

Networked Insights CEO, Daniel Neely, explains how your site can be transformed into a database of customer insights. Focus groups and surveys are research techniques of the past; the future lies in word-of-mouth strategies that have adopted to Web 2.0. By harnessing the power of these conversations, companies have the ability to hear their customers’ sentiments and take action on them.