October 28, 2010
Trade shows have been dying for many years to the point that they have been all but totally supplanted by vendor sponsored conferences. The vendors have become adept at the logistics of hosting large numbers of people for upwards of a week in cities like San Francisco, Orlando, Chicago and Las Vegas to name a few. Along with the care and feeding of masses of customers comes the messaging and at this point the vendor show differs from the conventional trade show considerably.
Where the trade show has been a great place to learn about new products and the reasons for their existence, the vendor conference has increasingly become a place where the vendors saturate their customers with marketing messages. Some learning may go on too but very often it involves learning how to use a vendor’s products. So it was a pleasure this week to encounter the SAS Premier Business Leadership Series (PBLS) in Las Vegas.
PBLS is certainly a vendor show complete with partner exhibit floor, keynotes and breakout sessions but there are the similarity ends. Unlike most vendor and conventional trade shows, the SAS event was by invitation and rather than devolving into a standard vendor performance, the SAS show’s explicit mission was to provoke thinking and idea exchange.
The conference could have easily been a long advertisement for SAS but instead it delved into a discussion of global economic trends and user driven breakouts that explicitly showed how analytics is making a difference in business performance in many vertical markets. There were presentations and discussions from
- Retailers (Macy’s, Staples, Chico’s Best Buy and others),
- Insurance and financial services (Transamerica Life and Protection, Chartis Insurance, UBS Financial, PNC Bank, Premier Bankcard, GE Corporate Treasury)
- Entertainment and hospitality (Harrah’s Entertainment),
- Public sector (LA County, Canada Post),
- Utilities (Oklahoma Gas and Electric, Northeast Utilities),
- Telcos (AT&T, T-Mobile, Research in Motion)
and too many more to list.
It was refreshing to hear from so many people who believe, like me that there is so much data generated in business today that old ways of using gut instinct are going by the boards and that analytics may be the only way to get an appreciation for what the customer thinks en mass. And the meeting was a clear indication that global businesses increasingly “get it” when it comes to collecting huge amounts of customer data through transactions as well as through social media.
Nuggets from some memorable ideas and interviews
Jim Goodnight, CEO and Founder of SAS said that education is one of the most important issues facing both our industry and country. His specific interest is in analytics, of course, but he makes a strong case for educating kids on using information derived from all the data we collect to make better, informed, decisions. According to Goodnight, SAS is teaching college professors to teach analytics-based decision-making and has sponsored an analytics major at NC State, which is oversubscribed by nearly four fold.
Jim Davis, CMO and wearer of many other hats at SAS, told me that in the last hundred years retailers had “…made buying decisions on gut instinct but that’s not longer possible because there is so much to know. In a down economy the mindset [of retailers] really changed and using analytics for assortment planning, merchandise planning and other key functions has made the difference between making a small profit and going out of business.”
No wonder then that analytics is enjoying a boom.
Gary King, CIO of Chico’s, White house/Black Market and Soma Intimates told me that analytics “Helps us maintain customer loyalty in a down economy.”
And finally, Eric Williams, CIO of Catalina Marketing, the company that prints your coupons at the grocery store told me, “In this industry things move so rapidly today. We used to say you don’t have to be first to get involved in a new technology, but today you need to be first or second.”
No doubt the influx of huge amounts of data from digital and social media helps to propel the demand for analytics and this sample only addresses a few retail examples.
But retail is not the only area where analytics has taken on new significance. The biggest market for SAS is in financial services, banking and insurance. Even Canada Post uses it. The thing that ties it all together is using information derived from the torrent of digital data to make better decisions—choices that make or save companies money.
Decisions are driven by some amount of deliberation and that’s where analytics come in and why coming together to think this week in Las Vegas was so important to the more than 600 mid- and senior-level executives who attended. It was an eye-opener and I wish you could have been there.
It’s often hard to maintain high visibility in the marketplace if you happen to be a private company and for good reason. Private companies tend to be small and they often do not attract the attention of the financial press precisely because the financial press thrives on the transparency and numbers that small companies prefer to keep to themselves.
But some of the most interesting large companies can also be privately held and while they might be known to the press and analyst community they give the finance guys little to write about. Too bad too, because you can miss a lot if all you’re looking for is numbers for the shareholders.
Take SAS Institute for example. Founded in 1976, SAS is a pioneer of the analytics market, has a thirty four percent share—more than any other vendor—generates about $2.3 billion in revenues, never had a down year and has always made a profit. But they’re private so the numbers don’t get the same attention a public company’s numbers would get because you can’t buy the stock.
According to the company, SAS spends about twenty-four percent of its considerable revenues on research and development, and their eleven-thousand plus employees in over four hundred global offices treat customers like customers think they should be treated. This alone should be enough to draw some attention but then if you add in the recent award from Fortune magazine for being the best company in the U.S. to work for you get serious wow factor.
James Goodnight co-founded the company with three other people, two of whom left the party early, too bad for them. Goodnight is the CEO and technical soul of the operation and this week I had the good fortune to attend an analyst and media briefing at their headquarters in Cary, NC. That was followed by something called the Premier Business Leadership Series event in Las Vegas, a business conference presented by SAS that brings together more than 600 attendees from the public and private sectors to share ideas on critical business issues.
I know what you’re thinking, but it’s been more than three hardware generations since I’ve been to Vegas and I routinely avoid conferences there but I went this time because SAS had some interesting things to say. First off, they made two product announcements that I can resonate with because they involve social media and more importantly, they make great strides in helping people use social technologies for business purposes.
I’ve been a fan of social networking since 2003 when I wrote about the the Kevin Bacon game and the original research by Harvard University psychologist Stanley Milgram in the 1960’s that began it all. But social networking and its enabler, social media, entered a lag period at about that time and they didn’t emerge from it until Facebook overtook MySpace. Meanwhile blogs became popular and we learned to wiki, which begat an orgy of tweeting and the rest as they say is history.
Lost in the social frenzy, in my humble… is the idea that social technology is a good listening tool, or ought to be. Social technology after all is a surrogate for an interaction with someone, a way to be present when you are not. In short it is a way to gather input from other people before launching our latest discourse about our favorite subject—us. SAS gives me hope that this might actually happen.
Exhibits A and B come in the form of two SAS product announcements—SAS Conversation Center and SAS for Customer Experience Analytics.
SAS Conversation Center most interests me. The conversation center measures the level of influence that a Tweeter has by analyzing the volume of content the person generates as well as how often the person is included in conversations. It then compares this information with a company’s taxonomy of topics to determine which area of the business the tweet is aligned with.
This analysis can help a company to determine what’s being said about it and determine which topics to pay attention to and to address. It may not be as good as a direct conversation but doesn’t have to be. It need only filter out the majority of tweets that are not relevant and it will be a powerful tool.
I would like to see the conversation center quickly evolve to track other social media, especially Facebook and it would be nice if a control center evolved with it so that a single interface could monitor the social sphere. We’ll see.
The second announcement, SAS for Customer Experience Analytics is a cloud based application aimed at providing predictive analytics to help companies present customers with the best offers at the right time. That sounds easy but it is not. Customers, especially when surfing have short attention spans and one chance may be all a vendor gets so the stakes are high. While other companies have similar offerings, one that has the SAS analytics engine behind it will be an interesting addition.
SAS for Customer Experience Analytics is the latest addition to the SAS cloud suite which includes 19 other analytic applications including SAS Social Media Analytics and SAS OnDemand: Campaign Management.
These products come along at a good time for the evolution of social technologies. In addition to new products SAS announced the results of a significant study it sponsored. Conducted with Harvard Business Review Analytic Services, the study’s findings are too long to list here so check the company’s web site. One example will have to suffice till the next time. Despite social media’s potential to enable companies to listen to and understand their customers, 75 percent of the companies surveyed did not know where their most valuable customers were talking about them, or what was said.
More than anything, these results show that social media is still clearly still in its infancy but solutions like these may be the killer apps that turn social curiosities into the tools we always believed they could be.
I am at the SAS Media Day in Cary, NC today and then on to Las Vegas for a SAS user conference. The company is poised to announce several new products in the social media analytics space and I will report later along with my analysis.
Clean drinking water is one of the toughest issues for the emerging world today. In fact safe, clean drinking water is becoming an issue everywhere. But in developed countries there are ways to spend money to develop or improve infrastructure and sources of water to tap. In the developing world, not so much. I recently revamped my blog site with a new skin and added a widget that asks visitors to participate in simple activities rating short videos (Ok, they’re commercials). The videos’ sponsors pay something to a charity to, in this case, deliver clean drinking water to people who need it. Will you help? Just visit the Beagle Blog and click on the SocialVibe image. It’s easy. Thanks!
Bob Warfield does a great job of summarizing “The Eight Flavors of Social” in his post from October 19 .
While I don’t disagree with Bob on these eight popular forms of social media, I might wish to offer an alternative to it or perhaps something that builds on this foundation.
To me social media comes in only two fundamental forms, inbound and outbound and like the blood supply to your brain you need both. If you prefer a different metaphor, recall the mantra from the original “Karate Kid” movie — “wax on, wax off.” Either way, you’ve gotta have both.
We’ve done a fabulous job of adopting the outbound side of the social equation and a passable job on the inbound, at least in personal use. But I think the big thing we aren’t getting fully yet is the power of the inbound for business.
In your personal life there is an implied quid pro quo with friends — I’ll look at yours because you look at mine. However, this approach is unreliable because we look when we can or want to or when we are bored. For business use we need greater assurance that our outbound messages are received, understood and acted on. In our personal lives the candy at our social sites — the thing that friends come back for — is the intimate detail of our lives. In business, the candy usually has a string attached because vendors want us to buy things.
For social to fully transition and make it in business there has to be a way to attract people, which means that if we’re using social as a glorified email marketing tool, and if we’re not getting the results we want, we may wish to reconsider how we do things. That’s where communities come in. You can ask any sort of open-ended question in a community and if you follow the threads and apply analytics you might discover the reasons that people are attracted to your business in the first place. With that you can significantly improve your outbound stream and complete the loop.
