The Basement

Hmmmm. A new article about Umbria Communications has come to my attention. For those of you just tuning in, I have been critical of Umbria for not having a marketing message that is consistent with their actual capabilities. This is not unusual in any industry – but in an industry focused on measuring word-of-mouth, Umbria should know better. That said, Umbria's CEO Howard Kaushansky has been very gracious about my criticism and he has said that they are preparing new materials, white papers and such, that will better illustrate the company's capabilities. For the time being I'm taking Mr. Kaushansky at his word and am patiently awaiting for these new materials. I had planned to leave Umbria alone for a while, but I'm afraid that plan has had to change. But, this post, is not about Umbria. This is a post about Business 2.0.

The article in question was written by Bridget Finn and published on Business 2.0's web site yesterday, August 25. The meat of the story is old news – G Whiz used Umbria to mine Gen Y data about cell phones for U.S. Cellular. This story is at least 2 months old, it seems Business 2.0 is very Web 1.0. Most of the details in the article are scattered throughout the web on various posts, the two most famous probably being the WSJ article and the Crystal Ball article. The Business 2.0 article mentions $6.7 million in funding which can be found in a Science Daily article from June 8.

What's new in this article? Well, here's the stuff I can't find anywhere else...

• Umbria has 40 clients

• SAP is a client

That's it. Everything else has been said over and over and over.

So what's my beef? Well, there's a quote in Finn's article that really rubbed me the wrong way...

Though Intelliseek and Technorati also crawl blogs, Umbria’s automated software is more sophisticated.

This, of course, is ludicrous. For several reasons – all of which I'll go into in painful detail in a few moments.

When I first read the article, my frustration was focused on Umbria – but then I realized, this information is all 2 month old press release droppings. [BTW – Umbria's PR firm GroundFloor Media seems to be exceptional if anyone is looking.] This is not Umbria's fault – at least not since my original post – this is old, old press release stuff. How come the folks at Business 2.0 didn't check this stuff out? How can they possibly claim Umbria's process is more sophisticated than anything much less Intelliseek? So I went to the source to ask that very question. Well, not the source precisely because Ms. Finn's contact information is not available on the Business 2.0 web site so I emailed the editor with my query with specific emphasis on my objection to the assertion that Umbria was more sophisticated than Intelliseek.

I got this response...

Hi--

The thrust of your allegations appears to be that because you couldn't get
information from the company that somehow it's running some kind of shell game
(or "smoke and mirrors" as you put it.) I understand your frustration, but we
didn't have that problem. 

We stand by story; our reporter was able to talk to a number of Umbria's
clients, including EA, and all were pleased with the company's methods and
results. I think part of the reason you have a problem with our story is that
it's 200 words long and therefore doesn't include the primary data and case
studies, that we had (and that you're looking for) but couldn't squeeze in.

Also, for the record, our piece went to press before your blog post. That said,
we still would have run with our item.

Good luck with your investigation, and thanks for the feedback.

Josh Quittner
Editor

Uh, no Josh, my concern with the article appearing on your website has a ludicrous quote in it that is unfounded. I have said that I think Umbria is probably doing some remarkable things and I'm sure that they do in fact have some satisfied customers – but to say that their process is more sophisticated than Intelliseek's is just plain silly. But since you didn't really address this, let's look at what you did address.

• Articles on Business 2.0's web site are somehow affected by something called "a press" that apparently requires that you write stories something like 2 months before they actually appear on the web. This amazing process apparently also makes article on the web irrevocable and unchangeable. How quaint and retro. Am I the only one that sees the irony here?

• Your reporter was limited to 200 words. Okay. Your reporter "was able to talk to a number of Umbria's clients, including EA, and all were pleased with the company's methods and results." Okay, then why not quote someone other than the one Umbria client that everyone else and their dog quoted 2 months ago (Bethany Harris, VP at G Whiz.) ? Wouldn't this be a better use of a few of those 200 words? Wouldn't new information be more valuable? You have to forgive me, I'm but a simple citizen journalist, I don't understand your advanced professional techniques.

• You had access to "primary data and case studies?" Holy schnikies man! You had the holy grail and all you could think to print was the same 200 words that everyone else did? Let me guess, uh, Gen-Y opinions used by G-Whiz? Wow, g-whiz.

• In fact, after talking with "a number of Umbria's clients" and having access to "primary data and case studies" the only things you could add to the conversation were Umbria's got 40 clients and one of them is SAP.

Brilliant reporting. I can see why you are "standing by your story."

Now, back to my point – which you skipped. Yes, I have questioned Umbria's capabilities and their marketing strategies – but my point today had to do with Intelliseek. Specifically, after providing some background on Intelliseek, I asked you the question:

Now, do you really believe that Umbria is "more sophisticated" than Intelliseek?

Since you didn't respond to that question – except to say that you stand by your story – I'll have to rehash it here for everyone to see. Before I begin, I should mention that I have emailed Mr. Kaushansky on this matter and he has been gracious enough to respond. In my correspondence I have told him that I want to be objective here. The point of this exercise is not to trounce Umbria any further, but rather to set the record straight about the comparison of Umbria and Intelliseek. I'm sorry Mr. Kaushansky, the folks at Business 2.0 made me do it. Here we go...

	Umbria Communications	Intelliseek
URL	http://www.umbriacom.com	http://www.intelliseek.com
Headquarters	Boulder, Colorado	Cincinnati , Ohio
Other locations	None listed on website	Orange County, CA San Diego, CA San Franscico, CA New York Washington, D.C. Pittsburgh, PA
Known Clients	Electronic Arts Sprint PCS G Whiz Logitech SAP	US Army PEO C3T BBC Canon Contemporary Arts Center Electronic Arts Ford Motor Company Gale Group Gateway GE (Capital Aviation Services) Gerber Product Company HealthNow New York American Honda Motor Co. Hyundai Motor America Jaguar Cars North America Microsoft Nokia Pepsi-Cola North America Philips Consumer Electronics North America Porsche Cars North America Procter & Gamble Sony Electronics Toyota Motor Sales TracFone Ubisoft Home Entertainment University of Cincinnati VH1 Volvo Cars North America Watson Pharmaceuticals Yahoo
Number of Case Studies on Website	0	5
Founding Year	2004	1997
Years in Business	1	8
Expertise of Management Team	ex-Corporate Attorney Entrepreneurship Computer Science Details can be found here.	Entrepreneurship Computer Science Brand Management CPG New Business Development Co-founder of WOMMA Interactive Marketing Advisory boards for Ad:Tech and ExpoTV Political Press Secretary Legislative Consultant CPG Internet Marketing CPG Viral Marketing Media Law – Intellectual Property, Defamation, Privacy, Press Access, and Unfair Competition Lot's of these folks are ex-Proctor & Gamble – one of the most successful consumer product goods (CPG) companies in the world. Details can be found here
Expertise of Advisory Board	Computer Science Machine Learning & NLP Cognitive Science Statistical Modeling Experience at Whizbang Labs Details can be found here	Computer Science Machine Learning & NLP Corpus Linguistics Information Retrieval Systems Experience at Whizbang Labs DoubleClick's CTO & Chairman Details can be forum here
Expertise of Board of Directors other than Management Team members	Information not available on website	Well, here their names and titles... John Gardner Partner, BlueRun Ventures James L. Heskett Professor Emeritus, Harvard University Bill Hildebolt President and Co-Founder, Expo TV Rick Kieser Principal, River Cities Capital Funds John F. Kwant Director, Business Intelligence, Ford Motor Company Marina Whitman Professor of Business Administration and Public Policy at the University of Michigan John H. Wyant President, Blue Chip Ventures Impressive details can be found here
Formal Corporate Partnerships	None listed on website	Convera Unisys T3 Corporation Lucrum, Incorporated Ness Ascendum inxight fast TrademarkBots.com medical.com thoroughbred partners Details and links here
Number of White Papers available	1 Signup to get yours here	6 Signup to get yours here
Available Products	Buzz Report Hype Report Demo Report Custom Buzz Unlike Intelliseek's interactive products, my understanding is that Umbria's products are static, fixed quantitative reports that are delivered with some predetermined frequency – weekly, monthly, quarterly. Umbria works with a customer to determine the focus of the study and tweaks their process to address the specific concern. While their analytics process may be exceptional, their delivery sounds very old school. DISCLAIMER: I have not seen a sample or demo of any of Umbria's products. Product descriptions here.	BrandPulse 360 BrandPulse Internet BrandPulse CRM BrandPulse Direct BlogPulse (free consumer facing portal) My understanding is that Intelliseek's products are actually a web-based application suite that allows the customer to conduct their own research – much like their BlogPulse portal, except with much greater control and granularity and a wider dataset that goes way beyond the blogosphere. Intelliseek, as I understand, will also work with customer on analysis, etc. if the customer doesn't want to do the leg work. Furthermore, Intelliseek can help with strategies to actually encourage and collect consumer insight for products – like CPG – that may not be heavily discussed in the wild. This includes stuff like FAQ engines, event feedback, sampling programs and continuous polls. DISCLAIMER: I have not seen any of Intelliseek's commercial products, but -as those of you who read my blog know – I'm a BlogPulse Trend junkie. Product descriptions here. Consulting Service descriptions here. Technical Services descriptions here.
Free Products	None unless you count their weekly marketing gig over at CMO Magazine – Blog Meter.	BlogPulse – the most amazing and powerful free Blog Anlytics tool on the web. It's reprehensible that some folks present BlogPulse as the sum total of Intelliseek – because Intelliseek does so much more – but it's certainly understandable. How can anyone provide BlogPulse and have time, money and energy for anything else? On the free side of the web, BlogPulse stands in a category of one. No other tool comes close for mining buzz.
Coverage of the 2004 Election	Umbria partnered with CNN to provide Buzz Reports on the election. The site is here.	Intelliseek's Natalie Glance co-authored a paper about the effect of the blogosphere on the 2004 election. Details are here.

In short, Umbria tries to give you a fish, while Intelliseek tries to give you a rod, a reel, some tackle and an ocean and a couple of lakes, then teaches you to fish.

Now, I haven't talked to customers and I haven't seen actual product from either company so I don't definitively know who's more sophisticated. But consider again what Business 2.0 reporter Bridget Finn wrote and Business 2.0 editor Josh Quittner defended..

Though Intelliseek and Technorati also crawl blogs, Umbria’s automated software is more sophisticated.

How can she possibly know this? Her editor Josh defended this statement, even after I gave him some of this background information. Now, I promised Mr. Kaushansky that I would try to be objective here, but in all fairness, does anyone, given this background information, really believe that, at this stage of their development that Umbria's techniques are really more sophisticated than Intelliseek's? What does that even mean?

You might have noticed that Electronic Arts is on both customer lists. Josh says Ms. Finn spoke with Electronic Arts. Were they asked to compare the two? The answer would have be truly newsworthy to the folks in this space and worth everyone of Business 2.0's precious 200 words.

Aside from the fact that I think this was irresponsible reporting, why was that statement even made to begin with. In the complex world of brand management, and word-of-mouth measurement, there is silver bullet – there is no better. There is only differentiation. (Can't you just hear Yoda say that? - Aaaaa young Jedi...)

So why was this said. Well, I asked Mr. Kaushansky if he felt that this quote accurately represented the sentiments of his company. Here's what he wrote..

With respect to the reporter's statement about Intelliseek and Technorati,
while I do not know for certain, she may have been referring to both
company's blog search products in her comparison.  As we both know there are
differences between blog search tools and analysis.  Both Technorati and
Intelliseek, as well as others, provide blog search services, while other
companies such as Intelliseek, BuzzMetrics and ourselves provide analysis.

This is the most accurate and fair message about competitors that I have seen from Umbria and I sincerely appreciate it. Thank you Mr. Kaushansky. I think Mr. Kaushansky has got it right. Ms. Finn probably made the mistake of confusing BlogPulse with the all of Intelliseek. She then lumped free BlogPulse portal in with the also free Technorati (which in it of itself is not really fair – they address different needs, but I'll let that slide) and then compared them to a commercial service with a completely different purpose. This is like saying a screwdriver is more sophisticated than a hammer. So, is bad reporting because the reporter didn't understand the domain or because she only investigated Umbria and not Intelliseek? I'll leave that an an exercise for the reader.

Yes, Josh, you may have gotten the facts right (although there is some question there in my mind) but you got the opinion way wrong. This illustrates a key difference between Business 2.0 and Web 2.0 - if you were a blogger – you'd continue to think.

While I don't expect reporters to have a deep understanding of the topics they write about, I expect them to know when they are writing about something they don't understand deeply – and when they are, avoid offering opinion, especially when it could be confused as fact.

For those of you considering Consumer Generated Media analytic vendors, please investigate Umbria Communications and Intelliseek and BuzzMetrics. They all seem to offer some interesting products with unique perspectives. I'm certain that one of them will meet your specific research needs.

This is how Charles Hill of Dustbury fame catagorized my discussion of the gas prices/Bush/Iraq tipping point. He talks about it here. His suggestion is that we try to "can get Cindy Sheehan a meeting with the chairman of ExxonMobil." As usual, Mr. Hill's suggestion seems more reasonable to me that anything I hear from any elected official.