being a said about its products or broader market share. One thing Jones says distinguishes Buzzient’s technology from its competitors is sentiment analysis, which turns qualitative statements into quantitative scores. In other words, rather than just gathering a slew of tweets on your brand, it rates how positive each tweet was on a numeric scale, to create an overall score.
“We’re turning words into numbers and allowing you to basically visualize those in our application or in an existing CRM [customer relationship management] system,” says Jones.
Speaking of that, Buzzient has formed a partnership with Oracle to integrate its product with the database giant’s tool for CRM. Buzzient also has partnerships with other companies that have traditionally helped manage customer feedback on products, like customer call center provider Interactive Intelligence.
Interactive Intelligence uses Buzzient to track what a customer who is calling about a product has also said on Twitter—which is becoming another dimension of managing customer information, Jones says. Just as companies started adding customer e-mail addresses to customer databases, many brands are tracking a caller’s Twitter handle, to get a more vivid picture of what they really think and are saying on the Web, often before they even call the 1-800 number attached to many products. And Buzzient says it can help integrate that buzz more seamlessly into a company’s customer database.
A big niche for Buzzient is the gaming sector, with customers like Seattle-based RealNetworks and its GameHouse division, which makes social and mobile games. The analytics software can track how players are responding to features within social games, to quickly and responsively determine which game elements to focus on or ditch, Jones says.
Jones started his career at Oracle, and in many ways he views the social media data his software gathers as an extension of internal company information. So, rather than just looking at social media sentiment in real time, the technology also paints a historical picture of customer feedback for a company, going years back. Companies can then look at the effect of what people said about their products on things like sales, Jones says.
Buzzient’s software can help companies track things at a micro level, such as
