Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Interview with Kristin Muhlner, CEO of newBrandAnalytics (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You are talking a lot about domain-specific ontologies and workflows. How many domains are you covering right now?

Kristin Muhlner: Today we have five service-based ontologies. We have one for food and beverage, one for hospitality, one for retail, one for healthcare products and one for government. All of those are under a general ontology that is unified under a service- or product-based organization. It speaks of general types of experiences that an individual might have when engaging with an organization. That can be modified to support any type of organization or industry.

SM: Do you deliver this as a professional service or as a product?

KM: It is delivered as a product. All of the data is delivered to a dashboard so the user gets direct access to an online dashboard customized to his or her particular needs. Going back to the Ruby Tuesday example, the general manager would get access only to his particular location and it might even be constrained so all that he sees are highly negative reviews – like food poisoning – or positive reviews, which he can then choose to act on. An executive level user would see a broad view across all locations and all performance characteristics for the organization. The regional manager might have a subset of that, or a franchise operator might have just that location-specific information to his franchise operation – all delivered in a rich and highly usable experience which allows them to filter and slice and dice the data on a about a dozen different filter methods. They can get deeply into the data and understand what is going on and look for opportunities for improvement.

SM: This seems to be a field where there have been a lot of companies in the last few years. How do you view your competitive landscape?

KM: It is a very crowded landscape; there is no question about it. One of the things we do is we look at this as a continuum. If you think about the social listening landscape at the true base of a maturity model, you have basic awareness and listening. A natural organization just wants to keep its ear to the ground and listen to what is going on out there. They don’t want something to go viral and not know about it. Maybe all they want to do is get a general pulse.

As you move up the maturity curve, you start to see organizations that really want to engage customers online. We see that most today in hospitality. If you look at TripAdvisor, for example, general managers frequently respond to guests. In many cases you have hotel organizations that are mandating that their general managers respond to certain types of reviews. Engagement is the next step in the process.

The third step in our mind in the maturity model is targeted marketing in terms of understanding the conversation, targeting specific campaigns, and closing the loop for the demand generation opportunity. Then you get into performance management and ultimately deep strategic insight and competitive intelligence – understanding what is being said not only about my locations and brands, but also the competitive ones that an organization cares about.

We expand that entire continuum. There are companies that may do part of that. Salesforce is a dominant player in the listening space, together with Radian6 and certainly with Budding Media in targeted marketing. But they are really at the front end of that continuum, not so much delivering on the performance management aspect, given the lack of location specificity in their platforms. You also have a variety of traditional guest satisfaction players and voice-of-the-customer players now looking to enter the market – maybe more on the strategic and performance management end, but not really being able to fit back in through awareness, theme extraction and engagement in a meaningful way. There are a lot of players, and we are certainly going to see market consolidation over the next couple of years.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Interview with Kristin Muhlner, CEO of newBrandAnalytics
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