Friday, June 25, 2010

The Power Of Doing Nothing

It is time for some Sentient employees to take off! Don't worry they will be back. We have Julie reaching her 3+ year mark and Kristen is in year 4. At Sentient we provide a little extra time off (you must take 2 weeks without email or contacting the office) and $5,000 travel allowance after 3 years and then every 3 years after that. The only catch is that we get to keep their computer and they can't call in to the office or contact us.

As we are fond of saying:
We all want to be proud of our work. But as important as our next project is, we know that it’s not our greatest gift or the greatest good that we can do. We have to work for a living, but it’s the living that defines us, not the work. 

Well, this is part of that "living" thing we strive for. So, Julie will be gone part of this Summer and Kristen in the Fall. I could try to explain the benefits of this, but I think this video from TED says it very well. (Though we have not figured out how to take a year off just yet.)

Friday, June 18, 2010

New ways to "research"

While it may not be “classic market research,” social media is bringing new ways for businesses to connect with customers for communication and feedback.

Interesting case in point – I was eating dinner at Tarka Indian Kitchen last night, and I saw that they had a well placed call to action to facilitate feedback from customers.

As my camera phone lacks the focus of an SLR camera, what you are looking at is a table tent that is found on each table.  On one side is the wine list, and on the side we’re looking at is an invitation to “Share Your Experience” by reviewing them on Yelp.  The final paragraph invites customers to submit their review immediately using Tarka’s free Wi-Fi connection.

With this open-ended approach Tarka is accomplishing several things:
  1. Driving user-generated content about their restaurant by encouraging reviews
  2. Gathering unstructured feedback from customers
  3. Advertising that they have free Wi-Fi
  4. Gathering point-of-purchase feedback from those that login at their table using their smartphone or laptop
Pushing customers to post reviews creates a wealth of data for Tarka.  What to do with this? One could use text mining (analyzing and categorizing unstructured data, e.g., reviews and other text), set up social media monitoring dashboards such as Yext or a myriad of other services that are starting to pop up and trying to take all of this user-generated-content (UGC) and structure it to help businesses make more informed decisions.

A tool we use to gain a topical level of understanding when looking at focus group data and other unstructured text is wordle.net.  With it we create word clouds where more frequently used words are displayed in larger font sizes and less frequently used words are displayed in smaller font sizes.  We have used this successfully to showcase brand attributes, political campaigns and many other areas. This can help identify broad perceptions and opinions people may have.  Below is the resulting word cloud when we feed Tarka’s Yelp reviews through it (note this is just a quick rundown – it has not been cleaned or edited of “nonsense” words such as conjunctions).