Attensity and Its Positioning
August 31, 2010
I found it notable that Attensity, a company known for its “deep extraction” technology, authored a feature in Mashable. Mashable is a Web publication that touches the throbbing heart of the Web world and its denizens. I cannot recall a company with roots in the arcane world of content processing and the government information projects contributing a story about social branding to the pulsing Mashable readership.
But the story appeared. You will want to read “7 Steps to Measuring Your Brand’s Social Media Health”. Like Lexalytics and Vivisimo, Attensity has been working overtime to develop a product and service line up that would generate healthy revenue and deliver a stakeholder pleasing profit. Attensity’s positioning seems to be expanding to embrace the world of processing social media to determine if a company is hot or not, provide insight about opinion upticks and downticks, and other “metrics” that are useful to sales, marketing, and azurini.
Here’s the passage I found quite interesting:
Social media is very easily measured with various indicators like share of voice, reach, retweets, and comments. However, measuring without a clear objective in mind won’t bring you closer to success. Nowadays, its not enough to have and execute a social media policy. You need to be able to gauge its success, measure it, and see that it remains healthy and vibrant.
The “easily” through me for a moment as did the reference to a previous Mashable story. I think I understand the message, but I am not sure how “easy” the methods for determine social health are. What’s easy is providing the client with a report without any of the details about what’s going on under the hood. If Attensity can package “a social health monitoring service,” then the company could steal customers from Lexalytics and other companies chasing the ad sales and marketing sectors.
My thoughts on the positioning followed a slightly different line.
First, Attensity’s no cash merger with German firms and its push into social media reminded me how much the market for next generation content processing has changed in the last 36 months. The US government funds that spawned many content processing companies may be tapering off. This means that companies with the type of technology that makes Department of Defense professionals salivate has to be repurposed to new markets. Is this what Attensity is doing?
Second, the positioning and verbiage used to make the firm’s technology outputs “easy” remind me that the new markets want vastly simplified value propositions. “Easy” can generate new sales, and I know that “easy” rings the chimes of consulting firms who are abandoning the traditional information retrieval sector like rats leaving a sinking ship. I expect to see a flurry of consulting reports that describe these new, “easy” products and services. I don’t think the methods are easy, but I want Attensity and similar firms to thrive. “Easy”? Never.
Finally, the vocabulary in this Mashable write up and on the Attensity Web site follow the approach taken by Vivisimo. These former search and content processing vendors are like leopards who have pulled off a genetic trick. The spots are gone, replaced by language and services that sound more like companies that are in the research and integration business. Little wonder Garnter folded its search quadrant tent. I think more search and content processing companies will try to pull off this leopard-changing-its-spots trick.
Just my opinion.
Stephen E Arnold, August 31, 2010
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One Response to “Attensity and Its Positioning”
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Hi Stephen,
Maria Ogneva from Attenstiy here. I’m the one who wrote that article. Thanks for your thoughtful commentary on our positioning. I’d like to address a couple of things if I may…
Firstly, I’d like to discuss my use of the word “easy” in the article. The point I was making, and perhaps it wasn’t as clear, is that although it’s easy to measure some social media metrics (like volume of coverage), doesn’t mean that you should measure everything you can get your hands on. The piece was a thought leadership piece advocating a thoughtful approach to measurement of social media, not advertising ease of one tool over another – in fact, Attensity was not mentioned in the article at all, beyond the author bio.
Attensity’s venture into social is not haphazard. Attensity has long worked with monitoring tools like Radian6 and others, and as a result of that process decided to internalize that capability and consequently purchased Biz360 (which is where I came from). As you know, being able to apply the text analytics that we have always applied to call center notes and emails, now to social media messages, is very powerful. Business intelligence across all these channels is paramount for business leaders who are not only looking to figure out what the market wants, but also get involved in a conversation, answer questions, provide support, etc.
Re: what’s “easy” and what isn’t about Attensity and other solutions in the market… We have a suite of products, which range from self-serve (Attensity360) to more sophisticated tools (Attensity Analyze) that require training, implementation and a proper internal analyst to handle. So while we are moving towards ease of use, our tools still run the gamut.
Thanks again for your discussion! We are here listening 🙂
– Maria