With PACE, Temetic Research aims to cut through ‘buzz’ of social web

Imagine you own a small business and a dissatisfied customer tweets about your company’s service. Soon more people latch on to that negative nugget and pass it along via their social networks. For a business that isn’t properly prepared, one thought can turn into a tide of negativity. But Rich Neal believes his company has…

 

PACE, which Temetic Research launched last month, is designed to cater to clients of all sizes.

Imagine you own a small business and a dissatisfied customer tweets about your company’s service. Soon more people latch on to that negative nugget and pass it along via their social networks.

For a business that isn’t properly prepared, one thought can turn into a tide of negativity. But Rich Neal believes his company has just the tool to sniff out and snuff out those threats. Neal is the chief envisioneer, chief information officer and director of research a strategy of Overland Park, Kan.-based Temetic Research, which last month released its first product, PACE.

PACE (an acronym for “perception, action, chain, element”) is a social web portfolio management system used to identify, track, plan, interact, measure and report on the social web. Its goal is to help companies actively engage individuals or groups discussing their brand, product, services and more.

So back to that hypothetical scenario about the negative tweet. Not a problem with PACE, Neal says. “It’s very professional and it enables other onlookers — which is the important part here — to understand that you’re on top of things,” he said, “that you’re not perfect and you’re willing to work with a customer on his or her problems.”

PACE comes in different shapes and sizes, designed to accommodate everyone from the owner of a single-location small business to a large firm with a diverse portfolio of clients. Small, sole proprietorships pay $70-$99 per month for PACE. The product costs large franchises/multi-location chains $499-plus per month. PACE runs $2,499 per month for enterprise portfolios. Temetic Research also offers a team-administered option, whereby the company manages a client’s entire social web and commerce operation, for $1,950 a month.

But in all cases, the underlying goal remains the same for Temetic Research. “At the end of the day, our hope is that we become invisible,” said Dawson Fercho (left), executive vice president of business development and product management at Temetic Research, “that (PACE is) something that would be akin to fire suppression in a server room.”

Off the buzz bandwagon

Temetic Research was born out of the belief that existing social intelligence tools were insufficient and outdated.

“It was around eyeballs, you know, unique visitors, stickiness, how long they were on the page,” Neal said. “Nothing here was really set up to measure socialization taking place online. We realized we really had to delve into what was missing. Everybody was on the buzz bandwagon.”

What’s more, Neal says, even if useful information was collected, no tools existed for acting on that information. Neal (left) recounts a question he has fielded often: “Once we do monitor — it if that’s possible — what the hell do we do now?”

In hopes of answering that question, Neal established Temetic Research. Originally a consultancy with a large portion of its clients in the agriculture sector, Temetic began work on PACE in 2009. A beta version of PACE 2.0 launched late last year, and the product was released into the wild early last month.

Temetic Research plays in the same space as companies like Hootsuite and Radian6, but Neal says PACE possesses capabilities that similar offerings from other companies don’t. First and foremost, he says, PACE is able to gauge more than the aforementioned B-word.

“You’ll get these reports and really slick visualizations,” Neal said of the competition. “But when you get down to the actual data what you’re seeing is 98 percent of them come in neutral because they’re not really sure how to judge sentiment and gauge orientation of opinion.”

Based on the idea of “digital sociology” — a concept Neal published a book about — PACE works by scouring social networks, conventional web sites, consumer review sites, user communities and news sources for discussion of a company. Then, using computational linguistics, PACE takes into account the context of that discussion to derive what Neal says is more relevant information for companies.

PACE also forecasts and identifies scenarios taking place online, tailored to what users of PACE consider relevant to them. That identification is used to power automated advisories and alerts to the company and, in some situations, automated messaging to the outside world. Clients can also choose the add-on of Temetic consulting to complement PACE.

Beta and beyond

PACE had 80 beta users, and Neal said all of them stayed on past beta testing. For now, the platform’s users are spread across three main industries: agriculture, automotive and food service. Neal declined to discuss specifics regarding clients but said they include “the largest brand in agriculture,” “the largest brand in the automotive technology vertical” and “the 11th-largest pizza chain.”

Temetic has a 13-person team split between Overland Park (home base for the executive team of Neal, Dawson Fercho and Phil Ledgerwood, the company’s CTO and director of futurestate technology), St. Petersburg, Russia and Beijing, China.

“Nothing here was really set up to measure socialization taking place online. We realized we really had to delve into what was missing. Everybody was on the buzz bandwagon.” -Rich Neal

Neal said Temetic Research is revenue-positive and that a couple venture capital firms have come calling. But the company has opted not to take any outside investment yet, dipping into its own pockets for the $200,000 or so in funding required up to this point.

“I felt that it was a real clear path to success in what we were doing through bootstrapping,” Neal said. “I wanted to have the flexibility to truly leverage what was taking place in the market. We see a lot of our competitors now going out of business because they didn’t have that type of flexibility.”

Meanwhile, Temetic Research is still going strong. And the company, which has a keen appreciation for how a single thought can snowball into something big, is exemplifying that very phenomenon in its growth. Once an idea in Neal’s head, Temetic Research has steadily gained steam over the last couple years, culminating in the launch of PACE. 

“The fruits of our labor are starting to come through,” Fercho said, “and we’ve got some serious, serious things going on right now that we’re very excited about.”


Image credits: PACE image from temeticresearch.com. Photos of Dawson Fercho and Rich Neal courtesy of Neal.

This story is part of the AIM Archive

This story is part of the AIM Institute Archive on Silicon Prairie News. AIM gifted SPN to the Nebraska Journalism Trust in January 2023. Learn more about SPN’s origin »

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