The Brian Magierski Interview, Part 2
Contributed by Rod Amis

At the end of the first part of the interview, Brian sent me to talk with the folks at ROME Corporation’s Initiative …

ROME Corporation specializes in risk management for businesses in the energy and energy-technology industries. Among its customers are Tesoro, ConocoPhillips and Southern California Edison. With offices in Austin and Houston in the US, and London in the UK, ROME’s reach, like that of its customers, spans the globe.

As mentioned in a recent edition of their newsletter, ROME Corporation has begun the ROME Institute, providing valuable information to, but also engaging with and getting valuable information from, its customers and others in the field by using the Kalivo Hub as a platform for sharing knowledge.

“Registered members of the site can start conversations list events and even program their own polls of the hub’s population,” said the article. “In other words, ping your peers about a question that’s been nagging you. The ROME Institute also takes advantage of the ‘tag cloud,’ a fairly new Web listing style that appears as a cluster of key words. While the tag cloud allows you to find your topic in an alphabetical list, the list is dynamic: the most frequently used tags appear in a larger font, giving a visual clue to the most popular or active areas of the site.”

Ann Puckett, Director of Marketing, leads the ROME Institute initiative. Asked about what had been learned since deploying the Kalivo hub at the Institute, Puckett told us: “The basic idea of reading an article and posting a comment or participating in a forum is not a new concept for our users. Unfortunately, there has never been a place for risk management professionals to connect and share information. Kalivo does an excellent job of creating a more intuitive and user-friendly way to converse with our peers and provide a personalized experience for our users. Some of the more advanced features, including RSS feeds, the tag cloud, and trackbacks, are not being used to their fullest. We continue to work on ways to educate our customers on these features. It is a learning experience for all of us.

“The best way to engage customers is to start the conversation internally. Once the conversation is started, people are more likely to participate. It is also important to make sure that your content is relevant. If you bring in a post from another website and you personally have no comment on it, then chances are nobody else will either. We use this as our litmus test for adding information to the ROME Institute.”

Puckett believes that another lesson learned while deploying the features of the Kalivo hub is maintaining a narrow focus. ROME Institute made the hub available to customers right away, she tells us, and that demonstrated trust and is making the hub one of the more popular destinations on the company’s Web site. She said the attraction comes from the hub’s ability to search, find, and manage content from across the Web, combined with a user-friendly interface that provides a rich set of tools for gathering valuable information. For risk management professionals, it opens new vistas of information and collaboration.

*******

While LeverageSocialMedia was speaking with Puckett, Magierski was off to a conference in New York. He returned with a new vision of how to address exactly what Puckett had shared with us: the issue of narrowing the focus of what the Kalivo Hub offered for certain clients, depending on where their needs existed. LSM went back to the well.

Magierski: We had a great conference at the AlwaysOn media event. As we build Kalivo by direct user engagement, we are certainly learning what prospective buyers think about the impact of Web 2.0 on their businesses, and where they are in adopting Web 2.0 technologies in marketing.

LSM: You remind us of the old saw about “Internet Time.” Kalivo definitely seems to be a company that means to be fast on its feet. As you look into segmenting your offerings, based on the maturity of an enterprise’s needs in the social media arena, what are the details of the new offerings you’ll roll out?

Magierski: Fortunately, Web 2.0’s development techniques, open source software tools, scripting languages and frameworks allow us to be nimble. Our broad vision is to provide companies with a Customer Engagement System, which will help them engage their customers and drive their marketing in all aspects of Social Media and Web 2.0.

Our primary need is to be an educator. We will sell consulting and advisory services to customers in order to educate them and us about what to do in Social Media Marketing. With our products, we have segmented our offerings to meet the multiple needs we hear as marketers experimenting with Social Media, namely:

• Monitor the Web for relevant information, such as competition, product feedback, and brand impact – much like companies use PR clipping services to monitor what is said about them and their market in print publications. This offering is the Kalivo Listener™, and it crawls the web regularly on behalf of a customer and produces Web Clippings™. Customers can create from one to many Listeners for different information-monitoring purposes.

• Analyze and respond to Social Media conversations and articles across the Web. Some marketers want not only to monitor the Web with the Listener, but to drill in deeper to understand the trends and volume of sentiment – namely, positive, negative, and neutral viewpoints – and which Web Clippings are influential/important versus irrelevant. This analysis will inform companies about whether and how to respond. Our Kalivo Marketer™ application, which includes the Kalivo Listener, allows companies to analyze and respond directly to external social media sites with comments to express the company’s viewpoint and engage in the conversation. The response capability is called Broadcast Response™.

• Host two-way conversations with influencers, customers, and other interested parties. Traditionally, these were forums that companies would host on their site. However, with the advent of blogging and Web 2.0 social capabilities, including tagging, RSS subscriptions, and others, the old format is stale and not nearly as rich, insightful, efficient or interactive. Plus the advent of blogging has much more pleasing interfaces for presenting and engaging in conversation. We offer the Kalivo Hub™, which is a blogging system, forum, and social network (including profiles, surveys and polls, events, etc.) all wrapped in one offering.

• If a company is ready for the entire Customer Conversation System, they can utilize the Kalivo Marketer and Kalivo Hub together, fully integrated.

Getting the product part of this for the different functional needs was important; however, we also dealt with the price-point issue to ensure marketers can experiment and adopt.

We’re planning to offer the Kalivo Listener, with a limited number of Listeners, on a self-service basis with a price point that would meet the needs of the Small and Medium business segment or an individual marketing professional’s expense budget.

We expect, as marketers begin to use the Listener, they will want to upgrade to more uses, including the analytics and response capabilities of the Kalivo Marketer. Also, as a few marketing managers begin to use the Listener on their own, we expect the entire department to eventually adopt and to then provide a more robust solution for the department or enterprise as a whole.

Likewise, our Hub pricing allows for relatively low entry-point pricing, but as the number of members of a Hub community grows, the pricing will increase with the value being created.

LSM: Is there anything else you’d like to offer about where you see the adoption of social media tools in the enterprise arena going? Please take a moment to “look over the mountaintop.”

Magierski: This is a big question, and I could probably go on forever. To keep it short, where this is all going is “marketing as conversation.” On an accelerating basis, companies must transition to this approach and away from telling customers what they want. That was Marketing 1.0.

The new way, Marketing 2.0, requires companies to listen to their customers and prospects (their market), learn through conversation and analysis, and engage by responding with what the customers want and not solely with what the company wants to give them.

Our tagline at Kalivo is “Listen. Learn. Respond.” The customer is in charge, and the Web is making this revolution happen. Whether a company engages on the Web with their customers or not, their customers are indeed engaged on the Web in an increasing number, and are influencing others – this is where the influence is happening. All companies in all industries will need to be engaging in two-way conversations with their customers in order to survive competitively and continue to add value.

LSM: Thanks for speaking with us again.
Note: Tom Parish interviewed Brian in November 2006 for Talking Portraits.

An Interview with Brian Magierski, in 2 parts
Contributed by Rod Amis

Austin, Texas’ Kalivo is a company that has jumped ahead of the curve in making the so-called “Web 2.0″ modalities relevant to enterprise. Instead of blogs or podcasts, Kalivo developed a Hub where your business can monitor what your current customers, potential customers and competitors are saying – all over the Web – about your enterprise and its products. This hub and its features go way beyond the information you get from focus groups and market analysts because they allow your team to not only monitor but also engage the people most likely to utilize, deploy, recommend or criticize your products and services.

LeverageSocialMedia found the Kalivo approach so unique and innovative that we wanted to sit down with one of the company’s founders, Brian Magierski.

LSM: Brian, thanks for taking the time to talk with us. Let’s start with how you came to found Kalivo.

Magierski: I’m a mechanical engineer by training, but have worked in enterprise software and web-based startups for more than 11 years. I started with Wit Capital, the first online investment bank, in New York in 1996, while I was in Harvard Business School.

After graduating, I was recruited to Austin by Trilogy, a front-office enterprise software vendor, to start their consumer goods industry vertical. In early 1999, I left to start iMark.com, which was essentially an eBay for companies. Austin Ventures funded it, and we built an auction hub for companies to trade used equipment and surplus inventory. We had a bigger challenge than eBay in building liquidity due to the fragmented nature of asset trading, so we ended up building satellite exchanges that were sold as hosted software products – at the time called ASPs.

These satellite exchanges were sold to websites where buyers or sellers would aggregate. The website owner paid us a monthly fee and we shared commission revenue. FreeMarkets bought iMark.com in March 2000. Since then I’ve been investing in and consulting to web and software start-ups, ranging from email security to enterprise risk management, in addition to working on a couple of projects of my own.

Scott Brittain, my co-founder at Kalivo, has been a software engineering professional for more than 15 years, many in smaller companies or startups. Scott’s career evolved from programmer to product architect to team leader and eventually to several VP of Engineering posts at leading software organizations, including iMark, Ten Rivers, CoAgent, RealVue, and now Kalivo.

LSM: Kalivo seems to have made a conceptual leap in terms of how enterprises leverage the power of the various applications and tools that fall under the Web 2.0 rubric. What led to this?

Magierski: A conceptual leap in this market is certainly part of what we hoped to accomplish in starting Kalivo.

Since business school, I’ve had a strong interest in helping companies use technology to create deeper, longer-lasting and ultimately more valuable relationships with their customers. I had worked on a plan to provide marketers software applications to understand the value of their customer base and construct specialized offers online. At the time, this was referred to as “one-to-one marketing.” However, I did not think the technology or core attributes were in place to actually realize the vision of the value proposition.

Recently, the explosion of social media combined with the Web Services infrastructure of the Internet, collectively referred to as Web2.0, made me realize that the pieces are now in place to connect companies and customers in a rich way – both from social interaction as well as data perspectives. The most important aspect of this shift to social media was user-adoption, namely that people were voluntarily going onto the Web and contributing content – their opinions, feedback, ideas and more.

The fact that customers were engaged proactively meant – in a two-way medium such as the Web – that companies could engage directly with their customers to build and grow relationships, as well as track and measure the success of those connections.
 
Scott and I set out to provide a complete arsenal of applications for marketers to engage with their customers. We also wanted to add to the existing state-of-the-art applications and Web capabilities. So, we set out to provide value to the marketer by leveraging whatever best technologies and applications existed. This meant that the world of Web APIs, such as Google’s search engine, and the existing best standards such as RSS and trackbacks were on the table as starting blocks for us.

LSM: Looking to the future, what feedback do you get from the IT community about their needs, and how are you responding?

Magierski: The IT community has many of the same needs as the corporate community at large. They want alignment with their constituents’ goals, feedback on their own efforts, timely interaction on all topics, and a personalized experience. Moreover, by virtue of their technology-centered position, the IT community may actually be on the leading edge of adopting new solutions to these needs.

We’ve responded by enabling the IT-to-constituent engagement channel and, subsequently, layering value-adding services upon that channel. In this way, we can be responsive to the IT community while also allowing them to address their needs in an a la carte fashion.

LSM: It’s always great to talk directly to a company spokesman, but what is missing, as I’m sure you know, is unbiased perspective. Do you have a client/customer we can speak with about what they’ve learned since using your Hub?

Magierski: I’d like to refer to you one of our early adapters, ROME Corporation.

Tomorrow … How ROME Corp. uses Kalivo’s Hub and the lessons it has learned, as well as a follow-up interview with Brian Magierski.

Just got here - a lot of well known people here but I decided not to speak to anyone yet.  After getting breakfast I listed to Rob Crumpler of Buzzlogic. 

As readers might recall, I asked for a Demo of Buzzlogic about 3 months ago - and was sopposed to get into the Beta Program.  Since then - nothing much happened.   I did not care for the way Rob Crumpler spoke - it seemed too artifical - like Buzzlogic is going to solve all your PR and Buzz issues - but I know it's not like that.  

In fact, I think Buzzlogic has the potential to give BrandPulse a run for the money (and there's probably a couple of other platforms similar to it)- and anything that gives Nielson a headache is a good thing in my book (since they're suing every analytics company that uses any of it's patents - at least, that's the way it seems to me).

In fact, I'd say that something about BuzzLogic reminds me, in a tangential way, of Eric T. Peterson's engagement score - just follow me here.   What Buzzlogic is trying to do is find the authorities - the people who really matter that are blogging or just talking about your company.  I believe, perhaps, that engagement might be a quality that goes with "authority".  If that's the case, Eric might have, without realizing it, defined an algorithm for determining authority - or a part of it.  Read  Eric T. Peterson's  post in detail to find out more.

I guess having BuzzLogic as part of the AO 100 makes sense - since the technology is disruptive.  More likely, if they become really all that disruptive, Nielson will just buy them out.

9:30 am – 10:15 am: CEO Showcase: Web & Blog Analytics & Research
        Rob Crumpler, CEO, BuzzLogic
        David Soskin, CEO, Cheapflights
        Amar Anand, CEO, eTIMEisMONEY
        Brian Magierski, CEO, Kalivo
        Benno Wasserstein, CEO, Box UK
        Demo Review by Industry Experts:
        Chris Fralic, Partner, First Round Capital
        Julia Hood, Editor-in-Chief, PRweek
        Brian Kelly, Partner, Manatt, Phelp & Phillips

Ok, I did not pay much attention to David Soskin, CEO, Cheapflights which seems like it used some analytics (but I did not catch what he said).

I spoke to Amar Anand, CEO, eTIMEisMONEY on Monday night at AlwaysON NYC, he's in NYC so I may interview him later.  I like Amar's way of speaking and his platform of making time into money and has a module for Bloggers to legitimately monetize their blogs.  eTimeisMONEY sells time and there's a commission on the time sold on the site.   It looks like a pretty good platform and he's launching today.

Brian Magierski, CEO, Kalivo is a platform for marketers that has a "listener" which crawls the internet and picks up relevant content and allow the marketer to respond to it.   It sounds to me like Kalivo has a nice way of categorizing what's happening in context to the what the marketer cares about - which might give it an edge; I like the analytics, based on what I can see.

You an even focus in of the type of Blogger platform (ie: WordPress bloggers talking about iPhones - and also categorizes conversations based on importance - and you can then interact with those sources - a very nice feature!)

ClickDensity ( I think it was Benno Wasserstein, CEO, Box UK  presented) is really presenting a standalone heatmap program that, while is fancy to look at, is not really much different than what most upper tier web analytics platforms provide in some form or another.  I like that each click on a page also includes the time spent on the link (page).  However, there are segmentation capabilities in ClickDensity - more how people react on the page (how quickly a visitor, on average, click on a link of the page).  It's not a replacement for your regular Web Analytics - it supplements it.

There were also 3 panelists that just came on the stage - Chris Fralic, Partner, First Round Capital, Julia Hood, Editor-in-Chief, PRweek and Brian Kelly, Partner, Manatt, Phelp & Phillips.

I think what the panelists/analysts above liked was the ability to know what the blogosphere is saying and interacting with it (as well as the attractive pricing).  The analytics seemed more intuitive - drawing a box around all this unstructured data in a visual way.   But the panelists want to know how the analytics here really work - and which one is better and why.   ETimeisMoney is also liked by the Panelists - they think it's a good direction to go. 

Anticipating issues rather than just being reactive.  But the Panelists think it's all about Google - Google dominates the conversation even though they are not, in away way I'm aware of, present at this conference.

Well, that's it for this session.