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In episode eight of the Tech Product Review podcast supplement, guest expert Andrew Jenkins chats with host Bill Banham about NUVI - a real-time tracking, analytics, and data visualization tool for social media.

For the people behind the company, it is a kind of platform visual intelligence. It helps businesses get more leads by making social conversations on the Internet actionable and insightful with the help of dashboards and unique visualizations.

Listen to the show here.

Read the transcript:

Bill Banham: Welcome to another episode of the CPSA's product review podcast with guest expert Andrew Jenkins. In this episode, we're going to be talking about NUVI. Andrew Jenkins, welcome to the show.

Andrew Jenkins: Thank you for having me.

Bill Banham: That was a bit of a large intro there Andrew but nonetheless, I'm still going to ask you the first question. What is NUVI and what else does it do?

Andrew Jenkins: Well, I didn't write NUVI's description so, next time I'm talking to them I can give them some advice on maybe you cut the copy down a bit but NUVI is a social media listing and monitoring solution that provides analytics based on the listing or the monitoring that it does for you, to make it more succinct. And it visualizes the results of that analysis.

Bill Banham: And what are two or three benefits that you've seen?

Andrew Jenkins: Well, I would agree and their claim to fame too is for real time monitoring, they are one of the best. You get a sense of ... And this is specific or predominately focused on Twitter, for example, if you were monitoring the Oscars or the Grammy's or the Olympics, you would get a sense of conversation volume, influencers, trending hashtags or topics and the peripheral or tangent conversations as well. And who are the nodes of influence within those. And you can be tailing in the conversation live as well to be filtering or blocking the irrelevant and drilling down on the conversations that you want to focus on. When we've used for a variety of different monitors, for example, in financial services, a branding agency came to us that has a financial service's client that was going to be introducing a new service to the marketplace related to exchange traded funds or ETF's.

They wanted to understand the conversation happening online related to ETF's as well as, in this case, the financial services company themselves as well as their competitors. So, we could get a sense of share a voice, sentiment regarding them and their competitors and what were the predominant conversation themes related to ETF's, all of which could inform their content strategy even before they've entered the market. How they are seen or perceived as a brand entity because they're already known for a number of other products and services so, would that bode well for them entering market or are there some issues that aren't being surfaced through social media listing that they might have to address before doing so. And it's those sorts of insights. A colleague of mine who does social media listing talks about when you're leveraging the insights from listing in reference to your creative and your content, your creative work tends to out perform work that was not modified or inspired by the insights that came from your social media listing.

So, I think there's a tremendous amount of value from the data mining if you actively listen on social but again, there's a high volume of conversation happening. It takes some time to figure out what you should be listening for, need to filter out the noise and what's irrelevant but there's always something very, very powerful to be surfaced if you do it right.

Bill Banham: Okay, so, you got to get to grips with the best ways to mine the data, understand the data to get most out of it and are there any other short comings that you could mention?

Andrew Jenkins: It does ... It's not so much a shortcoming, it's just a fact of life in that it takes a long time, well, shouldn't say ... A relatively long time and I am talking hours not days or weeks to tune a monitor. What I mean by that is, so for instance we were doing a monitor related to insurance, in this case, life insurance and dental insurance and travel insurance too. Well, nobody talks about life insurance with any degree of enthusiasm or excitement or even dental insurance, sometimes it tends to be complaints or they're wished they had benefits or whatever. So, sometimes more time is spent figuring out how do people talk about a particular topic or in the case of life insurance, it's not that they talk about life insurance, they talk about many things that have implications that are relevant to life insurance, like life events, as in getting married, getting divorced, having children.

You've graduated from college, first job. These life events have financial implications and so, this is where social media listing or monitoring, depending how you describe it, it's nuanced. You have to figure out ... And it takes several iterations, how do people talk about it? What sort of language do they use? The industry uses different terminology than their customers. For example, and I highlighted the distinction with insurance, we were working with a mergers and acquisitions firm, well, they talk about acquisition and divestiture and MNA, all their industry jargon that they're all familiar with. But the entrepreneurs that they target, talk about selling a business and buying a business and very common everyday language. And it's distinguishing those subtleties when it comes to building your monitor to surface those sorts of insights. Does that make sense?

Bill Banham: It does. To a lowly chap like me, I just about get it. I'm sure it makes much more sense to you. Now, is there a cost? Sorry, go ahead.

Andrew Jenkins: Well, maybe this will help. So, on the life insurance example, again, one of the things we were listening for was a life event. In this case, having a baby. Well, how many different ways can you express having a baby? Expecting, pregnant, having a baby, growing family, so, this is where a lot of the upfront work occurs where you're thinking up all the different combinations and permutations of how something gets expressed. And then we're recently doing a monitor again, related to financial services, which is one of our areas of expertise and we were monitoring the term retirement because this is ... RSPC's and etcetera, so retirement is a dominant topic. But we also have to set the monitor to exclude conversations related to athletes retiring and other situations where the word retirement comes up that doesn't pertain to my finishing work and do I have enough money in the bank to retire.

And so, retirement ... We're retiring the jersey. This athlete is ... It's their last game or whatever and so, again, you have to go through this process or these iterations of tuning a monitor, figuring out the language you want to use and filtering out the irrelevant noise that can skew the results.

Bill Banham: Okay. Let's talk about money now Andrew. Is there a cost? And if so, how much is it?

Andrew Jenkins: This is more of a premium solution. You can either ... If you're an agency like we are, then you're using it across multiple clients. If you're a brand who wants to do real time then you're using it the same way, pretty much but you're really focused just on your own brand and maybe doing some real time monitoring. You're looking at $500 dollars U.S. and up per month and that's based on the number of mentions that you're capturing and if you don't use your limit, it rolls over to the next month. But it can go up, if you're wanting to capture mentions in the millions, it can get more expensive.

Bill Banham: Okay so, it's not the cheapest. So, maybe it's aimed, perhaps more- ...

Andrew Jenkins: It's enterprise.

Bill Banham: Yeah. Larger organizations certainly, but I love the roll over feature there, that's a good way to earn and repaying trust, right?

Andrew Jenkins: Yeah, I mean in our case, we're sharing the cost amongst multiple clients. So, we'll have ... Any given month, we'll have a number of monitors running to service different clients for different projects.

Bill Banham: Okay, so, in your experience then, what have been some of the results?

Andrew Jenkins: Well, as an example, we had a branding agency come to us last year that had a medical association client and they had come up with six different personas for ... That was felt to be representative of the audience or the stakeholders, members of that association. And so, we were given a different number of conversation topics, health care related to monitor, which we did. And then we were able to ... So, this is where NUVI's capability and powerful functionality comes to play, we were able to isolate the distinct conversations around those target themes or conversation topics. Once we had tuned them appropriately to make sure we got the relevant conversation and participants, we were able to export those participants and then run analysis against them to determine whether or not the conversational participants matched from a persona point of view to the persona's defined by the branding agency. And they did.

Now, they would have been happy if we either confirmed or negated those personas through our efforts but, again, they were happy that we were able to confirm them. But that's just another example of ... More so than just, what are people talking about? This went even further from a drilling down for insight.

Bill Banham: Now then, are there any competitors? And if so, who are they?

Andrew Jenkins: There's quite a few competitors in the social media listings space. Systemos, Brand Watch, Meltwater, Crimson Hexagon and there all of ... You could be spending hundreds of dollars a month to thousands, depending on the solution you choose and the package and capability you select as well.

Bill Banham: Would you say that this tool is more geared towards B to B or B to C or a bit of both?

Andrew Jenkins: Oh, certainly for both because it's capturing conversational insights and that might be ... Share a voice amongst B to B competitors and B to C. For B to C, you're learning about what are people talking about related to your product or service? Are they happy about it? Are they frustrated? Who are they talking to? How are they referring to your product or service? Are they talking about it directly? Or indirectly? Are they talking about just ... Are they having relevant conversations with who you are and what you do? Maybe not naming you specifically but they're talking about their day to day life, their day to day activity. Like I said earlier about insurance, many people aren't talking about insurance specifically, but they're talking about life events that relate to insurance conversation.

And for both B2B and B2C and so, you have to learn over time or refer to someone who has the expertise in building monitors to construct one or more monitors. Sometimes we'll build multiple ones to create kind of a triangulation. Let's look at the conversation from this angle or perspective and then anther one from this one and another one from that one so that we cover all the bases. And yes, there's potential for overlap but we want to be able to kind of slice and dice the analysis in a multitude of ways.

Bill Banham: And just finally and we really should get some sort of drum roll sound effect for this. It's that time in the interview ladies and gentlemen when Mr. Jenkins here gives his fantastic rating out of five. So, what would you give to this tool?

Andrew Jenkins: I would give it a four. I think it's a strong solution. They've just introduced a new version and with better visualization, some enhance capabilities. As with any software solution, sometimes the migration to a new version can be a little bumpy. Hopefully for those that are listening to this, that's behind them. I've been using them for about two years now so, again, I tend to get onto tools early in their lifespan. I'm willing to forgive or tolerate a bit of bumps with betas and so on, in exchange for greater insight or more value from them because I'm more collaborative with the solution provider. But anyway, a four out of five. A strong contender and I think they provide great value and great insight.

Bill Banham: Wonderful. Thank you. And listeners, just as an FYI, I've always found Andrew Jenkins to be a terribly tolerant man even when he and I go to the bar and I tell him bad jokes. He still comes back so, Andrew Jenkins, for this particular interview, thank you very much for being the guest.

Andrew Jenkins: My pleasure, thanks for having me.