The Early Years

The Move from Social Listening to Social Intelligence

Converseon was founded as one of the first pure play social agencies after its founders left senior innovation and digital roles at WPP, IBM and other larger agencies and consultancies. 

We recognized as early as 2003 the need create new systems of communication that better aligned to real “human” communication  This was informed in part by early efforts by others to also revolutionize the industry (expressed very poignantly and powerfully by Doc Searles and David Weinberger in the “Cluetrain Manifesto”) were inspiring. “Markets are conversations” was the mantra and, in fact, inspired the naming of “Converseon.” During this time, we won multiple awards for our work including Top Social Agency of the Year” by DigiDay.

In 2008, Converseon turned its focus on social listening technologies and was among the very first to apply machine learning to natural language processing to social media data.  Working with Dr. Philip Resnik at the University of Maryland and Dr. Jason Baldridge, professor of computational linguistics at UT Austin (and now with Google), Converseon rapidly became a recognized leader, including being named Leader in the 2010 Forrester Wave, Enterprise Social Listening. 

“Converseon offers a leading product with its “customized for your needs” mentality. There is no standard Converseon installation, (Converseon) builds a tailored dashboard for its enterprise installation and offers professional services around every step of the Social Intelligence process. Converseon’s model of starting with technology and adding human analysis makes for highly effective data quality, leading custom reports and strong functionality.”

Forrester

Over a decade later, we stay true to our foundational views of custom NLP and and high data quality designed for the clients worldview and specific needs; but exponentially evolved and accelerated through the power of applied AI.

Converseon continued to provide social listening dashboards and solutions through 2015 when it evolved its next series of solutions to help further the industry.  During this time We were also among the very first to access the full Twitter Firehose and introduced emotional analysis via Plutchik’s Wheel in 2009 and was instrumental in the development of the industry’s first ethics, CASRO’s Guidelines for Social Media Research.   This helped us secure leadership in “social intelligence”