Welcome to Ed Roberto

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I’m very excited to welcome Ed Roberto to Collective Intellect’s leadership team as our new CEO.  I wanted to share my thoughts on why we made this move and what it means for the company going forward. When we founded Collective Intellect over six years ago, we wanted to help marketers truly understand what consumers were saying about their brands in social conversations.  It was clear that the first generation of social media monitoring solutions had serious flaws.  The “noise” generated by typical Boolean searches and the inability of those solutions to detect the “what and why” of the conversations meant that their usefulness was limited. Collective Intellect brought sophisticated analytics using latent semantic analysis to really get at the meaning and intent of social conversations – not just volume.  Fast forward to the Spring of 2012 and we are working with some of the largest brands in the world:  PepsiCo, Nestle Purina, Viacom Media Networks to name a few.   Our recent groundbreaking partnership with CNBC uses our technology to discover customer intent from social conversations, and then use that data to predict business results.  CNBC recently featured those predictions in their coverage of retailers around Black Friday and in the analysis of customer buying intent from Super Bowl Ads.  Predictive analytics seems to be on the mind of dozens of our clients and partners this year. This success has accelerated Collective Intellect’s growth trend by creating huge interest in our solutions.  Like any entrepreneur, I split my time between evangelizing our company vision and handling our day-to-day operational needs.  However, as we began to navigate this accelerated growth, I found it more difficult to maintain that balance. I get incredibly energized by working with our customers and partners, so I leapt at the chance to bring in Ed Roberto as CEO to help drive our day-to-day operations and make sure we are capitalizing on the opportunities we see in the market.  In my new role as Chief Strategy Officer, I will now be able to focus my time on fulfilling our vision and working with customers and partners to realize the full potential of social analytics, and now our data is being used to drive social CRM and social business Ed brings an incredible background in running high growth startups and will help us to stay on top of this accelerated growth.  Plus he is a genuinely good human being and I look forward to our partnership as we work to grow Collective Intellect. I believe that social conversations will change the face of marketing in the decade ahead and I’m excited that Collective Intellect is at the forefront of that trend.  I look forward to working with all of our customers and partners to leverage the boom in social conversations to help marketing organizations fulfill their role of growing businesses. Don