Blab CEO Randy Browning can barely contain his excitement when it comes to his company’s soon-to-be released BlabPredicts2, the first and only Predictive Insights console that changes how brands engage with customers by predicting what, where, and when online conversations will gain velocity up to 72 hours in advance.
Built by marketers for marketers, Browning told Loyalty360 that BlabPredicts2 has a 70% accuracy system-wide, and redefines “social search” by dynamically making the whole world of conversations relevant, crunching one million predictions per minute. It allows brands to optimize, plan and adjust media spend on-the-fly in “command center” mode, recon opportunities or pre-empt brand threats before they trend or go viral.
What’s more, BlabPredicts2 also acts as CMO dashboard to assess competitors/market shifts; deliver and execute adaptive marketing campaigns that go well beyond (reactive) real time marketing; and more efficient Digital Ethnography for entering new markets/new product launches.
Blab started in May 2012 and Browning said it took a year to gather its customer base.
“We’ve been working with our customers for six months now,” Browning said. “We’ve had some pretty fast success. We’ve taken those learnings and applied that into 2.0 which we’re launching on April 17.”
BlabPredicts, which is licensed by major brands, one of the four largest global media planning/buying agencies, and by Horizon Media, the largest independent media planning and buying agency in the U.S., uses a proprietary, non-natural language library approach to process social’s unstructured chaotic data and dynamically organize conversations based on size, velocity, and contextual relevance.
“We are very different from anything we’re aware of in the market place,” Browning said. “You can equate us to Google conversations. Google’s mission is to index the world’s digital information. I think of that as static data. Conversations are changing every second, always morphing, evolving, very chaotic in nature, and very disparate through blogs, images, and videos.”
Browning said Blab’s job is to classify, organize, and pattern all of those entire world conversations so marketers can leverage those conversations.
“When the world moved to real time, these brands I worked with (previously) weren’t comfortable engaging with big dollars in real time,” Browning said. “Dollars weren’t going into real time because they couldn’t control the outcome. Blab is a crystal ball telling you what will be resonating with your customer base in 72 hours. It enables every marketer to take predictive actions.”
Browning said Blab allows marketers to discover today what will resonate tomorrow to take predictive actions.
“We look at that data and make predictions in one to three minutes and predict out to 72 hours,” he explained. “What is resonating right now and what will be resonating in 72 hours. We classify, normalize, and predict on live data. When we normalize, we bring in 100 million conversations a day from 50,000 sources. We go into every single news feed around the world in every country, major blogs, and all the top social networks. We take this disparate content and normalize it into like conversations. No one else can do that. We can classify those conversations into a topic, not about search. It’s about seeding and discovery. This brings real-time data into a real context.”
Browning said the technology is advantageous to both global and non-global brands.
“You can tailor these topics anyway you like,” he said. “You can look at gun control in the Pacific Northwest. It’s not just when people mention gun control, but you’re able to discover all associated conversations you might not have thought about, and giving them insights that typically would cost hundreds of thousands in research dollars. Truly understanding your customers and what’s important to them.”
Understanding buyer behaviors sets up buying experiences … no one has been able to predict that consumer data, Browning said.
“Companies have been able to tap into their own data and behavior data and predict off of that,” he said. “We’re the first company that can classify all consumer data you haven’t been able to dig into and predict on. That’s the big difference. In today’s real-time world, the consumer data you can predict is very helpful.”
Companies can make informed decisions 72 hours out based on quantitative data, Browning said.
“When we have a 90% degree of confidence in a prediction, we’re typically 96% accurate,” he said. “It’s a real robust and strong system which we think will change the market place.”