HiveSight

Let Me See (the marketer's version)

Seth Godin is disucssing data again today, but mostly from a consumer's point of view. It's unfortunate that as a consumer I don't have access to that kind of data yet (although I'm sure that this kind of services are just around the corner). The good news is, that marketers now have access to wonderful data. Let's see how HiveSight can add some points to Seth's list, with marketers in mind:

19. Let me see my customers' favorite TV shows, sorted by their popularity (popularity with my customers, not the overall population). Let's say that I work for McDonald's, here's the list - click the genres to see the actual shows.
20. Now let me see the same list, but compare my customers with those of my biggest two competitors, in this example we'll have McDonalds compared with Burger King and Wendy's - here it is (apparently, Grey's Anatomy isn't Burger King fans' kind of show).
21. Repeat that exercise with favorite movies ( turns out that Wendy's customers are 2.7 times more likely to be Fight Club fans, in comparison to McDoanld's), musicians (did you know that McDonald's customers are the biggest hip hop fans, whereas Buger King's are much more likely than the rest to like country music?), video games (Wendy's customers have the highest affinity with those, versus the other brands).
22. Now let's flip sides. Say I'm a one of my favorite musicians, the Red Hot Chili Peppers; Let me see my fans' favorite favorite fast food chain. Here's the list, and numero uno is a fellow native of Seattle, Starbucks (yeah, I know, it's debatable whether Starbucks should be considered fast food).
    Now let's compare with another northwestern band, but from across the border - Nickelback. Turns out that Starbucks is their fans' favorite too. But check out Pizza Hut - huge difference there.
23. Let's get wild now - let me see my fans' favorite fashion brands. It looks like Nickelback fans leave RHCP's behind when it comes to brands like Holister, American Eagle or Abercrombie and Fitch. On the other hand, Nickelback, it turns out, have slightly more female fans. It's the other way around for the Chili Peppers.

Other ideas? Questions? Please share them in the comments.

HiveSight a TWS 2008 Winner!

We've great news today - HiveSight was selected as one of ten most promising start-ups in Israel in the TWS 2008 conference. TWS08 is Israel's official dot com.petition. We were selected out of 100 submissions by a very impressive panel of judges.

The event today was really exciting, especially since we had a chance to present HiveSight to many smart entrepreneurs, investors, start-up enthusiasts, and many other members of the tech community in Israel. Feedback is an essential resource for a start-up, and all the intelligent comments and suggestions that we got today will surely help us improve our product in the near future.
We were asked many questions on how we do what we do, which I'll try to address in this blog in the coming weeks.

I encourage you to visit the sites of the other 9 winners - there are links in the Mashable article covering the event.

My personal favorite is Nuconomy - their website analytics product is truly amazing.

Lamppost-driven Exploration

Today, a joke:

A drunk loses the keys to his house and is looking for them under a lamppost. A policeman comes over and asks what he’s doing.
“I’m looking for my keys” he says. “I lost them over there”.
The policeman looks puzzled. “Then why are you looking for them all the way over here?”
“Because the light is so much better”.

(I copied the text from here).

The allegory in our case is (surprise, surprise) consumer market research. Surveys specifically. The problem there is that you can only ask the questions you know about - you only look under the proverbial lamppost. Is that wise?

To quote Claude Levi-Strauss:

"The wise man doesn't give the right answers, he poses the right questions."

But how can you discover the right questions? Let's look to another wise man, Marcel Proust:

"The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds, that each of them is."

This is exactly what we built HiveSight for: you don't ask questions and get answers. Instead, you explore the world of human interests through the eyes of hundreds, thousands, even millions at a time.

Back to our lamppost allegory, what you may cal lamppost-driven exploration clearly won't yield much in way of new discoveries. I like to think of HiveSight as a new kind of lamppost - a very tall one, that sheds light on areas that weren't previously illuminated so you can explore and make new discoveries.

Go ahead and try it out. What will you discover?

Data First, Theories Later

My favorite gurus are talking about data this week.

In a great post today, Seth Godin discusses his five elements of marketing (and only one of them starts with a "P"). He begins with data and makes the following statement:

"Data is powerful, overlooked and sometimes mistaken for boring. You don't have to understand the why, you merely need to know the what."

On Monday, Chris Anderson published a wonderful piece in Wired, titled "The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete".
Anderson is making a bold claim, that the scientific method - "hypothesize, model, test — is becoming obsolete":

"This is a world where massive amounts of data and applied mathematics replace every other tool that might be brought to bear. Out with every theory of human behavior, from linguistics to sociology. Forget taxonomy, ontology, and psychology. Who knows why people do what they do? The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity. With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves."

And later in the article:

"There is now a better way. Petabytes allow us to say: "Correlation is enough." We can stop looking for models. We can analyze the data without hypotheses about what it might show."

It's as if he's talking about HiveSight!

Take the current model of market research, modeled on the scientific method - come up with a theory of your product and its place in the market and in consumer minds, formulate the questions to test that, build the panel or focus group, then finally test your hypotheses.
Now contrast that with the HiveSight model of consumer exploration - query for your brand, your competitors' brands or your product category, and discover who your consumers are and what else they like. No need to hypothesize - let the data speak for itself (we are there to help you listen).

Go ahead, try some of our examples, then build your own and start exploring. What will you discover today?

The Treachery of Images

The other day, I learned the hard way how dangerous it is to rely on people's prior conceptions to deliver a new concept.

I presented HiveSight as a new kind of tool for market research. Unfortunately, the "new" part was lost on the person in front of me, and instead he chose to focus on the "market research" part. The term "market research" conjures in people's minds images of surveys, questionnaires, and the all-important representative sample. HiveSight has none of those.

Naturally, it doesn't matter that HiveSight has none of those, because it's a very different kind of tool. We're not in competition with surveys. Surveys require you to arrive with preconceptions and compel you to look right under the lamppost. That's perfectly alright of course - if you know what you're looking for. We're not in the business of providing a representative sample of the population either. Why bother with such samples when you can cover over 50%, and in some cases over 80% of a population? 
Note that I said a population, not the population - if you're marketing diapers for the elderly, HiveSight can't help you. If you're in electronics, entertainment, fashion, food & beverages, beauty products, or any other industry where younger people, or social network users in general are your target market, then you'll want to check us out.

Back to my protagonist, I just couldn't get him to leave behind his preconceived image of what market research must be and see how we could provide value for marketers via different methods.

The takeout? I don't refer to HiveSight as a market research product anymore. We're a consumer exploration tool - we help marketers discover new insights about their consumers. Same meaning, different image.

Try Before You Buy

A guiding principle of HiveSight has been a pet peeve of mine with many websites. A company builds some online application, puts up a site that explains all about it, along with video or flash tours and lots of marketing blah blah, but you can't touch the actual goods and see for yourself. It's like looking at the promised land from afar, knowing that you're unable to reach it. You have to contact sales first.
Why?
I'm here. I got this far. I'm almost convinced, and ready to try your product out, I just don't feel like contacting anybody, or explaining anything. I want to see for myself!

Well, in HiveSight, if you got as far as our website, that's all you need. You can learn something new about consumers right away. No commitments. No "contact us to learn more". No hassles.
Of course, there's the occasional "register to receive updates", and you might even have to pay to unlock some extra value (we are a business after all), but all of that comes after you tried us out, and know for yourself that the investment is going to pay off.

So go ahead and give it a go.

Long Tail Friendly Market Research

The Long Tail phenomenon - the fragmentation of markets into many small niches, creates exciting new opportunities for smart marketers.
Your first problem though is coming up with the data you need -  traditional market research methods fail to deliver that data.
Surveying merely thousands of people is not enough since niches, by definition, would be represented by too few of the survey respondents. You need either a huge panel, or a standard one whose members are also members of some niche. In both cases, costs soar.
But hold on a second - how did you learn about the existence of that niche in the first place? You only asked the questions that you thought were important, so if you didn't know of a niche, respondents wouldn't be able to tell you about it. Even if some of them somehow did, then surveyors may not realize (or care) that the information is noteworthy.
So, in order to recognize new market niches for your current or future products, and to profile their members in order to position, place, price and promote your products correctly, you'll need a different kind of market research. It will have to be based on huge panels, to make sure that niches are well represented, and it will have to somehow point niches out to you, even though you didn't know that you needed to ask about them.

HiveSight is a uniquely Long Tail-friendly market research solution. First, our panel is huge, encompassing millions of Americans, so every odd niche interest is well represented. Second, our data is composed of what people tell the world of themselves, in their own words, so all those interests you've never heard of and would never have thought to ask about, come out.
Here's how it works: Our system automatically flags terms that are not yet recognizable. Our analysts then categorize those terms - giving them meaning. They have so far painstakingly categorized hundreds of thousands of such interests, and they're adding more each day. The result is a huge database of all the things that people do, care about, buy, listen to, watch, read, eat, drink, smoke, wear, play, drive and worship. In short, all that is human. It is all connected in intricate ways, and it's all laid out for you to learn from.
What will you learn about consumers today?

The Market Research Engine is now Live

It is with tremendous excitement, and a healthy dose of trepidation, that I announce the launch of HiveSight in public beta. Our site is now open to any and all.
It took us 14 months of hard work, longer and harder than we'd ever expected, and it's time to find out if we got it right.
We're still in beta, which means that the product still has many bugs and glitches that need solving. Nevertheless, I belive that it's good enough to bring before the public for some serious critical judgement.
So if you want to learn more about consumers, I hope you'll find HiveSight is useful, and that you'll leave a lot of feedback too - let us know what we got wrong and what we're still missing.

A Market Research Engine

What happens when you set a creative mind free?
You can never tell in advance, but you can bet that it'll be something beautiful.

So how do you set a creative mind free?
You make it easy to be creative. You supply inputs that spark new ideas, and tools that make it easy to shape those ideas into a new reality.

The internet is the greatest platform for creativity. It provides us with a plethora of channels for information and knowledge, endless sources for new ideas, and a multitude of tools to help us mold those ideas into works of art.
The keys here are ease, speed and affordability. Everyone and their grandmother can use a search engine (I know my grandpa can...), you get your results instantly, and the only cost to you is (mostly relevant) advertising that attempts to grab your attention. The same goes for the tools that let you edit your work, publish it, and again watch others' works that seed further creativity in you.
When no-longer necessary frictions are removed, and the tools of creativity are made available to everyone and easily accessible, we witness the explosion of creative power possessed by humanity.

But what about business creativity? We, the marketers, are most certainly the creative types, what wonderful new achievements will we reach when unnecessary frictions are removed and the tools that seed our creativity become easy to use, fast and inexpensive?

In a few weeks, HiveSight will launch a Market Research Engine.
It's a new kind of tool for marketers that makes the task of understanding their consumers fast and easy. We hope to make market research, sometimes a chore, fun and conducive to new insights and boundless creativity.
Stay tuned...