Factiva, A company that listens, and then listens more

Categories: Community Marketing, Social Media, Voice of the CustomerPosted on August 31st, 2006

As a customer of Factiva, I was very pleased to have a conversation with the product teams, I was invited to a concall with the product managers located both in Bay Area to New Jersey.

I expressed my needs to find tools that will help me to monitor the blogosphere and all other kinds of ‘participant produced’ content –it’s a big task. We talked about long tail vs influencers, impact of audio, video, and the impacts on corporate reputation. We talked about active listening and reporting, and how you need both, to date, I’ve yet to see a tool that can do both well, but when I do, I’ll tell the whole world.

A few days ago, I forwarded them the meme “What should companies be Monitoring” it was a large discussion that bounced around the blogosphere (35 links to my post alone), and even went to Marketing Guru Joseph Jaffe –it’s important stuff.

I love it when companies listen, something that I lead at my company, and I love it when they involve customers as a data point to help craft their strategy. I don’t expect them to make drastic or immediate changes just because of my opinion (in fact I’m just one of many voices that matter) but it was a healthy conversation.

1) Factiva is a company that customers pay to listen to the market,

2) They also do a great job of listening to customers, reading blogs, talking, and having conversations .

See how Daniela, an employee there also listened and responded to me via YouTube –companies of the future will build products WITH customers using the conversational web as a tool. Of course, the next step is to take all these data points (I’m one of many) connect the dots to make the big picture and include in the product futures.

Update: I’ve given some thought about our conversation yesterday. One question was posed to me: “What matters most, the influential voices (well known bloggers) or the smaller bloggers”. I didn’t have a good answer right at the time, but it’s very clear to me that it’s ‘All’ the voices. I’ll bet the voices in my industry (which I’m tracking) are not all influencers or have a lower (better) technorati rank. In fact, my technorati rank is lower than most bloggers in much of the data storage industry. It’s not my voice that matters of course, it’s the small voice that influencers others. If all of the bloggers on this page are being picked up (and others like them) then I think that’s a good start.

Update 2: The ever-patient Glenn has responded to me from his blog. To read his thoughts and reports on blog spam, interesting and likely very valid. David Sifry should respond.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, August 31st, 2006 at 3:39 am and is filed under Community Marketing, Social Media, Voice of the Customer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

The cool thing about our conversatin is that you didn’t send us an email with your feedback which is typically what we might expect from a conversation like this-you because this is your voice-blogged about it (how nervous does that make other companies perhaps!).

Even better however is that your post showed up on my corporate portal RSS feed tracking ‘factiva’in the blogsphere- where i saw it first before my bloglines subscribed feed that i will get to this evening!

Posted by daniela barbosa on August 31st, 2006 at 8:49 pm

I really enjoyed the conversation, Jeremiah. Factiva places a high value on conversations with its clients (so much so that most everyone in our 200-person Product department has “talk to clients” in their performance management goals every year.) I can say that the people on the Factiva Insight team can check off that goal as having been met somewhere around January.

Admittedly, it’s something we didn’t always do well years back, and we paid the price for it, sometimes developing features that weren’t needed or developing features that were needed incorrectly.

That said, I’d love to see us put together some sort of informal discussion in the near future with you and other influential bloggers who are talking about media measurement, to help us to continue to craft Factiva Insight products that serve the users, not our whims.

Posted by Glenn Fannick on September 1st, 2006 at 8:54 am

Sure, let’s put together an informal discussion.

I would suggest the Bay Area would be a great place do have such a discussion.

I would suggest not limiting the attendance to ‘influential bloggers’ only, but to include folks who have roles at companies that are responsible for listening to the blogosphere.

I’m unique as I straddle both roles.

Let me know the timing.

Posted by jeremiah_owyang on September 1st, 2006 at 9:21 am

I did respond to Glenn’s post, and the answer to his latter question is that 55% of all of the blogs we are tracking have posted at least once in the last 3 months, and just over 11% of those blogs have had at least one post in the last week…

Dave

Posted by David Sifry on September 2nd, 2006 at 9:00 pm

Hey Dave,
Thanks for the comments. Did you see the Wired article on Splogs in September’s issue? I noticed you were interviewed for it. I’m wondering your perspective on its overall accuracy? I posted a comment on it.

Posted by Glenn Fannick on September 5th, 2006 at 12:18 pm

David

Great job ‘listening in’ thanks for the response –I’ll be blogging about Splogs soon.

Posted by jeremiah_owyang on September 6th, 2006 at 1:57 am

[...] Conversation about ‘Splogs’ (Fake blogs that steal content to gain revenue from Ads) has occurred in my comments between blogosphere thought leaders Glenn Fannick, and David Sifry. Determining the exact number of splogs is debated, and then trying to find a solution to silence them is impossible. Glenn has some conservative analysis worth reading. I’ve a feeling the numbers are somewhere between Glenn’s 1.4 Million and David’s 50 Million of active, genuine blogs. [...]

Posted by Web Strategy by Jeremiah » Splogs on September 6th, 2006 at 2:17 am

[...] I’m a former customer of Factiva, I suggested they progress their offerings to better measure CGM/Social/New Media, this event is a response to that discussion. [...]

Posted by Web Strategy by Jeremiah » Factiva Social Media Roundtable helps to answer “What should we measure” on December 6th, 2006 at 9:09 am