Razorfish VP Shiv Singh tells us ad agencies like his pay brand monitoring firms like Motive Quest, Visible Technologies and Nielsen Buzzmetrics anywhere from $5,000 to $40,000 a year for insight into what consumers are saying about their clients online.
Shiv says these agencies would happily pay Facebook twice as much for a rival service.
"I think Facebook is sitting on a gold mine," he says.
Already Facebook has a free service called Lexicon, which, according to the company, "aggregates and analyzes millions of Facebook Wall posts every day to provide a searchable database of trends over time."
But Shiv tells us he and his fellow marketers want a "Lexicon on Steroids."
That product, which Shiv says any Fortune 10,000 CMO would happily pay $1,000 month to access, would need to include these features:
- The ability for a researcher to type in any brand name and see the amount of conversation going on about it.
- The ability to do the same thing on a comparative basis.
- The ability to narrow that research by zip code, IP address, demographics or interest -- "Seinfeld fans."
- The service must show what kind of words brands names are clustered with. "If 9/10 times 'Levi' is associated with 'cool' and 'Gap' is associated with 'cheap,' that's great insight," says Shiv.
This "Lexicon on steroids" doesn't sound like it would be very difficult for Facebook to build. Why hasn't it -- especially at time when we know its looking for and failing to find funding? We think there are two reasons:
- After 5 years, Facebook only has 900 employees. After 5 years, Google had 1,600 employees. Facebook might not have enough engineering bandwidth to properly focus on building revenue-generating products and keep 200 million users happy.
- Mark Zuckerberg isn't much interested in marketing services. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg is always the company's rep at big marketing events. Mark isn't. Shiv admits he's met Sheryl, but not Mark. That's a problem. If Mark is going to be a complete CEO and not just a product whiz in the Sergey Brin and Larry Page mold, he needs to take a greater interest in what marketers want to do with his social network.
