You're insulting people if you are not taking care of their Anthroponymy, and could be losing 31% of sales.

Jim James: 0:18

Today, I was joined by Danny Levinson, the CEO of Transformania, all the way from Washington. Danny's had a long and illustrious career in technology, and newly established (they started late last year) Transformania is a marketing tech company that focuses on names. If you're a scientist, you might know them as an anthroponymy type of business. But for the average Joe on the street, they focus on formatting and enriching names. With a database of contacts which people add data to manually, from an API, from a web form, or by scanning business cards, that name data goes into their database in all sorts of ways, sometimes first name then last name or last name then first name. Sometimes, there are typos, or a maiden name gets thrown in the mix. Sometimes, it's difficult to understand if it's a maiden name or nickname, but they handle all that. They parse it, format it, and send it back, so that you can easily identify who's in your database. CRM, marketers, folks that are using Salesforce, HubSpot, Zoho marketing, and the like are th y people they are targeting. He ays basically anybody with a li t of contacts would be using the r system. The result is both n API, so you can plug it into our back end, and also a do-it yourself app. You go to their w bsite, upload a list of cont cts, and they spit out the corrected, formatted, and rich ata for you in a few minutes Danny says their platform is v ry easy to use. Their main c mpetitor is IBM, which has a service like theirs that costs illions and millions of dolla s. IBM targets financial cri es and national security, while ransformina doesn't care about hat. It's important to them a individuals, but as a company, they're focused on arketing. When IBM gets somet ing wrong on the national s curity side with the name, may e somebody dies. With Tra sformania, they jus have mud on their face, and hat's easier for them to de l with. Danny talks about enriching the data, to which I asked how According to Danny, they help folks with personalization at exactly they go about that process and how they're able to scale by plugging it directly into your CRM. Salesforce will send them the unformatted data, and they send back the formatted data. Another way they help with personalization at scale is after you download that CSV or Excel document from them, you re-upload it, and they have these trademarked new columns of data called the "Dear me" fields. They have formal and casual "Dear me." They'd still put, for instance, "Adrian" in t e first name column and "James in the last name column. But b sed on other data that we enr ch, either they go out on the internet to find data or t ey find data from the file it elf, they will know that Jim is my nickname and my ca ual "Dear me." If someone's go ng to send an email to me an they say, "Hey, Adrian," I'd pr bably think it's probably someo e who doesn't know me, but if t's, "Hey, Jim," then I'd think it's someone I probably had a prior relationship with, and tha 's personalization. And so, that s how they format that data to make sure that it's pe sonalized at scale and that yo can then interact with th comply with GDPR. He says they're coming out with a North America version first, which will be released soon, and the European and Asian versions will be coming after that. They do keep in mind that regardless of where they are in the world, they need to comply with GDPR. California has a new regulation similar to GDPR in mind, because although they're in Potomac, Maryland, they can have clients from anywhere. As far as GDPR goes, folks who are interested in data governance will be using them as well, because according to some of the data governance rules, both at the legal side and corporate side, you can only maintain and keep data for a certain period of time. And if you're only going to keep it for a certain period of time, you have to maximize the value on that. One of the ways you maximize value is by getting the most bang for your buck from what's in there, and they help with enrichment of that. When it comes to going out and finding other third party data, Danny says they do have some constraints on that in places like Europe, rightfully so, but they can also mine what's in the file itself. Oftentimes, what clients give them, they can find lots of gems from what's already apparent there. They can estimate someone's gender, their age, and other novelty things that really help supercharge their client's marketing campaign. My next question for Danny was what kind of analytics and reports they're giving back to the client, as that's another key part of any sort of CRM and personalization at scale. Danny replies that they produce a good insights report available both online and also as a PDF. To give us an example of what type of data is in there, first of all, they do some nice things like breakout, what are the largest nicknames, what are the largest number of formal names, the largest number of casual names. You get the idea. They'll tell you if you have a lot of Hernandezes and Smiths and Joneses on your list, or a lot of Mike's, Sally's, and Jane's, things like that. For them over at Transformania, what's actionable is understanding your sender reputation. Sender reputation revolves around your domain name and how other ESPs or email service providers look at your domain name, whether you are good or bad. They don't provide data on your goodness or badness, but a look at the type of domains that your contacts have, for example, if it's Gmail-heavy, if it's hotmail-heavy, if there lots of individual domains in there, and they give you processing messages and codes on things that you might need to pay attention to. The other thing they do is they break apart every single record, and they give full transparency on it. If your file has, say, a million records in there, for every single row in there, they will give you multiple codes on what they did with that record. For instance, once they format and enrich "Adrian James," they'd give you a code that says that they first split the name, and they added a nickname because "Adrian James" doesn't have a nickname built in but they found one and they added one. They also remove the extraneous text, and they'll give you a processing code on that. "Adrian" can be both a male or a female name, so they'll flag it so that you can go back and double check to make sure that they marked it correctly and that "Mr." James would be appropriate. They have lots and lots of data to give back, but they also don't want to confuse people. They want to make it super easy for us just to grab the data and put it in and use it. That's what the CSV is for. But for folks who are really big data wonks who really want to drill down, that's what the insight report for. I then asked Danny if Transformania helps me sort their data into different campaigns, like grouping names together based on geography so that I can release emails at certain times a day by geotargeting. Danny says they don't give you the ability to send the message, but they do give you the data that you can then segment based upon. If there's data in there based on geography or people's addresses, they separate it based on, if you're in the US, based on states and cities. They also can give you congressional districts in the US and other ways to parse and format that data. Outside the US, they're still looking at different ways to do that. Again, they're coming out with the North American version first. Danny shares that he spent over 20 years in Asia, so he knows Asia better than Europe. It's all very exciting stuff that they're looking at, because it does give you the tools to then figure out how to segment the people. However, as far as the actual toggling a button and clicking send, that's still on us to deal with. Since Danny mentioned his time in Asia, which is how he and I know each other, I then asked how they handle mixed language campaigns and data. He says that by doing North America first, which is a melting pot of culture, they actually get to tackle pretty much every name and every ethnicity around the world. He does admit that there are some challenges with formatting Asian names. For folks who aren't familiar with Asia, some of this might be very interesting, and so Danny decided to share this with us. A couple of years ago, Japan passed a new law that mandates you to do last name first, first name last; in the western sense, surname first, and then a given name last. Up until a few years ago, it was quite common for Japanese to use the western standard of doing their given name first followed by their surname. Shinzo Abe who stepped down recently would actually be Abe Shinzo according to the new Japanese law. Japanese names, as far as figuring out the surname and the given name, are fairly straightforward. There's over 40,000 key Japanese surnames, but once you understand the logic and throw that into your AI, then it's pretty easy to figure out who's still using the first name last name syntax, and who's using the last name first syntax, according to Danny. Moving to Korea, Korea has just about 60 key surnames. Korea is pretty easy, Danny says. Their surnames are, by and large, one syllable, followed by their given names which are usually two and three. Looking at China, you're dealing with many different dialects. You have Hokkien, you have Hainanese, you have Shanghainese, you have folks in Singapore and Taiwan who have Chinese names and different ways of writing that and maybe even concatenating their English name to that. You might have someone in mainland China whose name is Xie, but elsewhere, especially from Cantonese languages, it might be spelled as Hsieh. Xie can also be a given name, so it's a surname and a given name. So, how the heck do you figure out if it's a first name or last name in the western sense, or surname or given name? The good news is Transformania has done all the hard work and figured that out. Transformania is launching in a few months, and currently, they're in the beta period, where they're actively working with small and large customers to make sure that they're sending out, on day one, a fantastic product. You can find more information on their website, and here, tyou can register for the beta and get in touch with Danny. Transformania is really at the forefront really of technology, commerce, and communications. The reason I feel this is important is because under our SPEAK|pr program, which is Storify, Personalize, Engage, Amplify, and Know, we talk about personalization at scale, and the challenge with personalization at scale is the data management alongside working on the different avatars. Personalization at scale requires a data management tool like Transformania that can take large amounts of disparate and ill-formatted content, and standardize the format so that when you do the mail merge within the fields of your database and your campaign software, each individual person is getting personalized content, but also the address line, the "Dear me" as they call it at Transformania, is appropriate. In my experience having built campaigns with different media in Southeast Asia from different countries with different naming formats, the ability of a product or a service like Transformania to take large volumes of data, sort them, and give them back to me in subsets that I can use without any anxiety about sending emails to the wrong people or emails addressed improperly is going to be a great relief. Let's not forget, personalization at scale for media relations, for internal, for journalists, for our staff, for our partners, and our customers is an essential part of public relations.