After quietly filing patents and operating in “stealth mode” since 2009, IDInteract‘s founder and CEO, Matt Standish, formally launched his brand interaction software platform in December. Now, he’s in the process of opening what he calls a “center of excellence” in Detroit, which will eventually employ 100 software developers, to go with a three-person office already in Seattle.
“We’re a fast-growing company really focused on elevating social CRM,” Standish says. “We bring unstructured data together and create demand signals for a brand.” What that means in lay terms is that Standish has developed an algorithm that not only reads what you’re saying in your tweets, blog posts, Instagram selfies, and Facebook missives about certain brands, but it’s also able to gauge the emotion in the communication.
IDInteract is able to understand, over a period of time, how people are using verbs, where they are geographically, and whether they’ve downloaded related mobile apps. IDInteract takes that data and combines it with what it calls optional structured data—which includes a customer’s account number, purchase history, and current address—to build a customer persona, which he says provides actionable data on consumer opinion.
A dashboard for each consumer tracks what’s said about the brand in social media, the consumer’s mood regarding the brand, preferences, emotion, location, any personal information, whether privacy settings on social media accounts is low or high, how much the customer has spent on the brand already, and, finally, what the customer is worth to a brand in terms of revenue generated and the customer’s ability to convert members of their social networks into potential customers.
If this all sounds like a highly invasive endeavor, Standish disagrees.
For starters, brands plan to use all of this information to tailor coupons and other savings offers and make them as relevant to an individual customer as possible. The more customers spend and the better they communicate about the product on social media, the more valuable the coupon they receive. Standish also says that his platform is based on the identity access management principles of the OAuth 2.0 API.
“We understand user privacy policies and we’re able to respect those policies,” he says. “We allow users to pick how they want to be communicated with.”
He uses an example from his own life to show how IDInteract’s technology facilitates more meaningful interaction between brands and customers. Standish is a big fan of tennis and, consequently, the Tennis Channel. Most cable providers don’t carry that channel, but one day he discovered that he could watch it on his Xbox. Had IDInteract been tracking his persona, it’s likely Xbox would have already been aware that he was one of its customers and had been lamenting the lack of tennis programming
