The New Focus Group: Mzinga Launches at TechCrunch Boston
Mzinga lets corporations create social networks for their most ardent customers or alumni and retirees. It offers a menu of social modules that companies can add to their sites, including blogs, wikis, surveys, polls, calendars, forums, tag clouds, file uploading tools, individual profile pages, group pages, and idea-management tools with Digg-like voting. Faulk used to be the chief marketing officer at WebEx, and Mziinga already powers the community portion of its site. WebEx’s most hardcore customers can join and give feedback there about future features that WebEx should implementing.
This must be the month that social networks go corporate because last week another white-label social network launched called Networked Insights. Like Mzinga, it lets companies create a place on their sites where customers can hang out and talk about their products. But it uses semantic analysis and concept matching to extract meaning from all the chatter, and ranks conversations or comments based on how many interactions are associated with it. So a loud, whiny customer who complains a lot about a product in comments, but nobody else is joining in or linking off him, counts less than the quiet customer who only made one insightful post that spurred a torrent of other comments, links, ratings, and invitations to others to join the discussion.
Of course, being able to capture all of these discussions and mine them for meaning make them potentially more powerful than any focus group. The trick will be to get a representative sample of a company’s customers to participate, as opposed to just the most opinionated or the ones who are already brand fanatics.
Faulk is also taking a social approach to marketing. Mzinga’s software was used to create a site for the express purpose of crowdsourcing a book. The book, We Are Smarter Than Me, was written by 5,000 different people and published by Wharton. It was released on September 24th, and already the first print run of 15,000 is nearly sold out, says Faulk. The book is about—what else—how to use crowds to help your business.