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INSIGHT Q&A with Pete Santora, Founder of ThundrLizard

Pete Santora is a former two-time All-American and professional soccer player who was the co-founder and managing partner of Blue Sombrero from 2002 to 2010.  In 2010 he was president of The Entrepreneurs Society, a Georgia Tech affiliated company that provides seasoned mentors for entrepreneurs in five countries around the world.  He is now the founder of ThundrLizard, a social data analytics platform that helps companies develop digital personas for sales and marketing.  Pete’s team is working on the next evolution of social data analysis called Diversalytics, which is a service that helps companies not only digest “big data,” but provide a more engaging psychographic understanding of who and why their customers are customers.

Diversalytics is still in its infancy stages, but we were so intrigued by this concept that we set aside some time to talk to Pete about how it works and how colleges, universities, nonprofits and large companies can all learn more about the makeup of their own customer base.

Can you outline how Diversalytics works and how it can be beneficial to an organization?

Diversalytics is a social analytics platform with a focus on diversity insight that can be extracted from the combination of email and social data.  We take a customer list of email addresses and aggregate public data from around the web.  In essence, we are creating virtual personas for every email address to drive a more customer-focused analytic process.   

Most enterprises already have a lot of data on who their customers are, but they lack the real-time predictive capabilities that social data can provide if it is connected with known customers.  This whole process is another step in persona modeling and segmentation. We want to help companies understand their customers better and tie that to the sales process in real-time whether that is in person or online. 

The reason we exist is to help companies build capacity on these trending problems in a way that they can be used for their marketing and engagement strategies.  The future of marketing is about curation and emotion.  This is especially true online. In order to be successful at driving commerce, you need to make messaging more relevant…it’s not sufficient to just know the overall market numbers.  You have to know your customers and be able to leverage that in real-time.  

You can’t ignore diversity if you want to get relevant.

What led you to create this concept?

I am a huge believer in the power of relevant communication but to be relevant you have to know something about me.  Most Chief Marketing Officers have spent their careers taking in top down market numbers.  Now CEO’s are asking them to get closer to their customers all the way down to the individual because that’s where the power in the marketplace has shifted.  Existing systems just haven’t caught up.  However, existing systems are trying to bridge the gap with one mind towards collecting new raw information and another mind towards organizing existing customer information.  Social business is really about this marriage.  We think more about collecting organized information, which allows us to make sense out of it in real-time.  

How much more effective is the information Diversalytics provides than surveys and traditional market research?

Market research groups are really going to drive home the point that these are two different types of data, quantitative (market research/survey) and qualitative (social).  But Diversalytics is bridging that gap between data that can be observed and measured.  Social data is user-generated, bottom up, free form and real-time.  It’s not as quantitative, but it is cheaper, easier and faster to acquire.  If you couple this approach with a solid plan for how to respond to customers, and to also be prepared to engage with the customer, then a company’s relationship with its customer could change dramatically. 

What type of organizations can benefit most from Diversalytics?

Well, retailers and large business to consumer companies will benefit the most right now.  This would also benefit government entities with a constituency services or community development department.

Can you discuss some of the clients you’ve had embrace this new concept so far and what sort of results you have been able to derive for them?

Institutions of higher learning and nonprofits along with business-to-business and business-to-consumer organizations.  I can’t discuss client lists because of the sensitive nature of the data.  However, customer centric analytics that deliver more relevant communications to drive commerce are taking place in corporations around the world.

As social media becomes more and more prevalent in our society, do you see Diversalytics becoming a widely embraced ideology in the years to come?

Enterprises want to listen to their customers.  They want to go from social, to sales, to loyalty.  They want better predictive measures and they don’t want to get caught being complacent. Data from the 2010 Census shows that the U.S. population is more diverse than ever before.  Social channels are proliferating and old mainstays like newspapers and TV are searching for new business models.  This is the single largest disruption in human communication since the printing press. Add the world’s most diverse population and the shift in the balance in power from markets to consumers and I think Diversalytics allows enterprises to rethink the value of diversity in the enterprise.

Originally published in our February 15 issue (March 2012).
 
 


INSIGHT Into Diversity