Friday 13 August 2010

External BI and How Weight Loss is More Interesting than Life itself

More and more we find ourselves helping customers with externally facing business intelligence as well as what we might call traditional and internally facing business analytics.

Those that work with me will know that I advocate articulating BI requirements as business questions so External BI can be characterised as answering questions like;

  • Which of my prospective customers are doing things that they might need our help with?
  • What are my competitors doing that represent threats or opportunities?
  • What is happening in my marketplace that will affect our strategy?

B2C businesses might also ask questions like;

  • What are our customers saying about us?
  • Do we have a good or poor reputation?
  • What do people think about our brand?

It is important that the answers to the first block of questions are detailed so that you get answers from editorial sources, blogs and tweets that might include 'Our #1 competitor has changed their advertising agency' or 'One of key accounts is rumoured to be making an acquisition' The second block may also need detailed answers but it is surprising how much can be determined by monitoring the volume of traffic or 'buzz'.

A solution we recently built for a pharmaceutical company gave us some fascinating insights based on buzz. During the first two weeks of the implementation one of their drugs was associated with cancer. As you might imagine, the volume of posts, news stories and tweets spiked dramatically. Over the next few days, the volume decreased as the facts became known and rumour and speculation were displaced. Eventually the buzz quietened to normal patterns. Unusually, the following week, a second rumour surfaced. This time, that the very same drug was associated with weight loss. The same pattern emerged with a pronounced spike over a few days followed by a calm induced by rational and factual information dissemination. What was surprising to us was that the spike associated with weight loss was higher and longer. In other words, there was more interest, more conversation and more interaction when a product was associated with weight loss than when it was associated with a terminal disease.

Sigh.