Social Media Darwinism

Gut Feeling or Analytics – which is better?

Paul Dunay — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 18:00:34 +0000

So I was talking with a CMO buddy of mine the other day over dinner and this topic came up. Of course you know as a CMO of a leading Social Media analytics firm – I think you can guess which side of this argument I was on. But seriously, my buddy honestly wanted to know – so what can you do with all this good social media analytics that you talk about? He really didn’t know.

So here is what I told him that marketers should be doing with analytics but haven’t truly adopted. I think part of the problem is that some of these tactics haven’t become a standard operating procedure but I can tell you folks that is exactly where we are heading. Marketing is the last big spend on the income statement and its our turn to show how we can be more effective with the same dollars.

One way is to use the analytics to create your ideal customer persona by interviewing your best, most profitable customers who have had the highest velocity in your pipeline. Use this persona to drive any ad plan, sponsorship plan or event plan.

Another way is to use the analytics to inform your media plans and to predict the outcome of a specific campaign.

Another way is to use the analytics to zero in on new messaging or even use those words to inform the SEO and SEM that you should be doing or buying.

Another way is to use it for product innovation, some companies are not crowdsourcing ideas for their products rather they are using the analytics to find a “white space” in the market where there is an unmet need – then launching a product or service to fill that need.

These ways are guaranteed to make you dollars more effective since you will know with certainty how effective those dollars will be in hitting a predefined target. How can you hit a target you can’t see – with good old gut feeling – I doubt it!

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What Social Data can Teach You about Audiences

Paul Dunay — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 18:00:44 +0000

My son is a senior in high school and I am beginning to help him with his search for the right school. One of the aspects of college life that he is looking forward to is belonging to a university with strong school spirit. So to help with this, I suggested that we use football teams as a proxy to find the right environment.

With this in mind, we set out to find a simple list of “2011 NCAA Football Rankings” – an easy Google search is there ever was one. I assumed that the top result, ESPN’s 2011 NCAA Football Rankings, would be the perfect match for our search, until I looked at the data.

ESPN’s site lists one ranking by the Associated Press, one from a USA Today poll, one from an ESPN poll, and one from ESPNU fan ranking. This made me wonder which one of these polls was best for my son as the intended audience. The intent of these polls was purely statistical and did not meet the needs of a college bound high school senior, and therefore provided little help for our cause.

After this discovery, I contacted my Audience Development team here at Networked Insights and asked them to develop a series of lists of the top NCAA football teams for various audience categories. I wanted to focus my research on Millennial Males, Moms (of course his mom is going to have a say!), and a list of teams by Geeks who love Consumer Tech (my son and I both fit into that one!)

The research that I received from the team was really interesting because each of the audiences had completely different lists of favorites!

The Millennial Males would say LSU, Oregon, and Auburn are tops; while their Moms would prefer Florida, Alabama, and Auburn; and the Geeks like Texas, South Carolina, and Wisconsin.

Whether you agree with using ESPN’s Top Ranked College Football teams as proxy for strong school spirit is not the point. If you are marketer – you need to know what your specific audience cares about. High-level survey data (like the data from the AP, USA Today and ESPN) can lead you in the wrong direction if your target is Millennials, Moms, or Consumer Tech buyers!

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Trust is hard to come by these days

Paul Dunay — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 18:00:13 +0000

For years I have kept tabs on the Edelman Trust barometer report, which comes out every January in Davos. And this year was no exception. After last year I figured this years report could make an excellent gauge of the economy worldwide!

Simply put the report states: Trust is down in every industry and every country across the board by an average of 6%. So what does this mean for marketers and for major brands in an era of social media?

Well 2 things …

Hidden in the data is the fact that CEOs and Government officials are at the very bottom of the totem pole when it comes to delivering a message that people trust. So welcome to the era where the average “Joe” employee is considered the most trustworthy corporate spokesperson. This is clearly a boon for the all of us who have been clamoring for our in house engineers to be out there blogging and tweeting with the public. Effectively they are now the only ones that the general public will trust to speak about your brand.

But to me that’s a quick fix on how you get information out of the company that the general public would believe. To really change the tide of this era of declining trust you need to consider what I’m calling “hyper-transparency.” For example look what Apple is going through with its overseas vendors. How can you company do the same or even take it to the next level. And be vigilant with those vendors that aren’t in compliance. You would need to say “here is where we are and are not compliant with our overseas vendors and here is what we are doing to fix it.” This would send a clear message that the corporate message can be trusted.

But where do you start?

There is obviously a clear need to understand what the general public perceives as your biggest issues and to have a feedback loop to measure your progress on these key issues. Which to me clearly underscores a need for trend analysis around your brand (think Google Trends for your Brand) to understand what to attack first to raise trust in your own company. This can’t be solved with typical social media software. You need to analyze trends of what’s being said across the issues that are important to your company. This doesn’t come from reading tweets everyday about your brand it comes from analytics of all forms of social media – blogs, microblogs, social networks and forums.

With the right technology and the right partner in place you can rebuild that trust that so few (if any) companies have these days.

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Brands: It’s not enough to be liked

Paul Dunay — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 18:00:44 +0000

Imagine a company that has upscale retail locations around the United States receiving tens of thousands of customer visits. Now imagine not having anyone there to greet and interact with those customers. What’s the point of the storefront?

Facebook fan pages are much the same thing. But only 0.2 to 2 percent of fans go back to a page. Why? Because there is nothing going on that interests them.

Fan pages are a unique marketing canvas to connect with avid consumers. Yet some brands are terribly underutilizing these pages, making them basically brochureware repositories — essentially inviting customers in but not engaging them or giving them an incentive to return. More so, they don’t understand what their customers want from them. Fans may “like” the page, but what good is it really doing the company or its customers?

Other brands are working harder to tap their pages’ potential, inviting fans to post on the page, using brand-generated posts to ask them questions, and offering promotions that capitalize on the fan base’s affinity. The fan page becomes a focus group that can be mined for consumer insights, which can feed back to content creation, stage gate development and campaign tracking. It isn’t the “like” that matters; what matters is creating conversations to understand the consumer.

A two-prong approach of audience discovery and competitive analysis can help uncover what motivates and energizes your consumers.

Audience discovery is the use of social data to segment those who talk about your brand into their affinities. When you understand your audience, you can tailor the message and campaign to generate more fan attention. And if you understand what to do with your fan page, you can give it a new place in your owned media platforms. Rather than investing in media properties that become more expensive as they become successful, you’re now on your way to developing owned media that increases in value the more it’s used.

What do your consumers want from you – coupons, product updates, cutting-edge video, exclusive deals or contests? What are they interested in – sports, music, TV? Do they care about your brand affiliations or sponsorships? A “like” is a passive response to content, while a comment is engagement.

Brands need to mine competitors’ fan pages for insights. Competitive analysis provides insight into what your fans and their friends find engaging on other brands’ sites. What do your fans like on the competitor sites? Are your competitors treating your fans in ways that provide an edge over your company?

If you were running a bricks and mortar store, you’d expect your floor people to find out what customers want when they come in the door. In the same way, audience discovery and competitive analysis can help you be in sync with your Facebook fans. Knowing their interests can help you establish a road map to effective fan engagement. You can then repeat the analysis periodically to capture nuances and shifts in fan interests. Now that’s something you and your customers will really love.

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How important is real-time data? It’s all relative

Paul Dunay — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 14:35:36 +0000

The speed with which social media spreads ideas and information has led many marketers to place a premium on capturing data in real time. But should real-time data be such a priority?

Real time means different things to different people when the term is used as a proxy for recency. To an evolutionary biologist, real time could mean thousands of years of species development data. To a 911 dispatcher, real time is a few seconds worth of critical information from a telephone call.

What about marketing and advertising? This notion of “relative real time” extends there, too. To a marketing executive, real time may be data necessary to make annual, semi-annual and quarterly budget decisions. Real time to a media buyer may be several weeks of ratings data to understand what target consumers are viewing. To ad networks serving targeted banner ads Web visitors, real time is microseconds.

Ultimately, gathering the most data possible to inform a decision or solve a problem — in the window of time that best suits your need — is more important than having instantaneous data access. And to do that, you need to start with how you’re going to use the data. What do you want to accomplish? What business problem are you trying to solve?

While social data is exciting because it’s abundant and easily accessible, it’s still relatively new for corporations and how they’re integrating the voice of the consumer into business processes. Real-time social data is just another information source to be incorporated into your decision-making process, from problem definition, to research analysis and, ultimately, project execution. Data doesn’t need to come to you any faster than the time frame that process allows you to act on it.

At Networked Insights we help brands analyze social data for improved decision making — daily, weekly and monthly. While access to a rich data set sounds appealing, sometimes more is not better. Rather, understanding the behaviors of your target consumer is the quickest path to achieving marketing success.

Start by analyzing the decision cycles within your organization or department and how you want to engage data. The timeline of that process will determine what, relatively speaking, real time means to you.

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Making Marketing Agility Cool

Paul Dunay — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 18:00:37 +0000

Chief Marketing Officers take pride in being the trendsetters around the corporate corral – the arbiters of hip, the sharpest dressers, the consummate gadgeteers. But when it comes to using data to support decision making, the CMO is likely not to be the smoothest operator.

Each year the Marketing team works hard to distill consumer insights into planning documents that will guide its programs in the months ahead. Meanwhile, there are already other departments within corporations that are continually refining their budgets and plans using the latest business intelligence data from enterprise resource systems.

Good creative will always be important in marketing. But when customers can abandon you for a competitor in a mouse click, it’s simply not enough. You have to be ready to act in a heartbeat. And to make the right moves, you need the ability to acquire consumer data, interpret it and apply it to your marketing programs – all in near real-time.

Winning companies are defined today not by their product and service offerings but by the manner in which they respond to the needs of their consumer. Social media data analysis opens windows into consumer conversations, producing real- or near-real-time data that can guide key decisions in marketing and across the value chain including product development, production, sales and customer support.

Better data can lead to better decisions and, ultimately, better outcomes. Now that’s cool.

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Romi Mahajan leaves Microsoft to Join Metavana as CMO

Paul Dunay — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 14:00:31 +0000

Long time friend and well respected CMO buddy of mine Romi Mahajan is leaving Microsoft to join Metavana. Romi has been profiled on my blog several times so its only fitting that reached out to find out why. What follows is a transcript of what I learned.

Q: Thanks for taking the time to chat with me Romi, I’ve been a fan of your blogging on ResearchAccess for quite some time and it’s great to finally have a chance to reconnect. I understand that you’ve recently made a significant change in your work situation what can you tell me about that?

A: After an aggregate of 9 years at Microsoft, being the CMO of a $100M dollar digital agency, and a writer, I wanted to get back to my roots in terms of “building” something that had huge customer promise and could make a dent in reality as we know it. My new role as CMO of Metavana, a soon to be launched social-sentiment engine, has all the elements of my dream job – People, Impact, Autonomy and direct correlation to both the Consumer and Enterprise spaces. The chance to build a crack Marketing team and to make potential energy highly kinetic is an exciting (and daunting) proposition!

Q: So social sentiment analysis is a big debate and quite the rage now, with new companies and new approaches cropping up frequently. What makes what you’re doing different than all of the others?

A: I don’t like to speak ill of other companies so let me concentrate on the good parts of Metavana instead of the ‘bad parts’ of others. What drew me to Metavana like a moth to a flame? A few things:

I believe the problems in this space are not just smart Engineering problems. I think they are physics and math problems that require the right level of scientific rigor coupled with elegant engineering and CS. We approached this space through the lens of Chaos Theory and non-linear mathematics. That itself puts us in a category of one.
I believe in accuracy, especially since large companies, governments, and individuals are creating action plans around the result sets we provide. Metavana’s engine provides amazing accuracy with regard to the polarity of comments on the Social Web and as such will be an integral part of any organization’s business model.
I am a strong believer that social sentiment and voice of the customer cannot be sequestered in some nether region of an organization. Further, that VOTC can’t be a one-off, expensive, episodic and hard to implement ‘project’. It has to be present in the very warp and woof of the organization’s fabric. We believe we have business model innovation that will help us get to ‘ubiquity’ in an easy and customer friendly fashion.
Finally, I’m drawn to Metavana because we aren’t trying to solve every problem. We have a gorgeous ecosystem of partners who will apply their expertise to get us into the last mile of the customer journey. We are an engine!

Q: Wow, that does sound pretty damn interesting! Of course I know of NLP, LSI, DA, etc.. but I’m not sure I’ve ever heard of anyone applying Chaos Theory to social sentiment analysis! Without giving away anything IP, can you tell me a bit more about how the Metavana engine works? Also, since there is a huge debate among academics and suppliers, about which technique is best, can you describe how you arrived at this model as the best approach to bring social sentiment into the boardroom?

A: First of all, all of those other methods are sensible at some level and not at others. Not looking to pick a methodology fight but we believe Chaos and Symmetry theories are the next phase of evolution to get accurate, fine-grained “meaning” from unstructured and emotional content. Metavana aims to make all systems socially-aware so that all employees in the Enterprise make VOTC part of their jobs!

Q: The name would suggest that you are making a “big data” play by combining multiple sources of meta data from the social web to create a VOC “nirvana”, which of course is kind of the holy grail for everyone in this space. How are you tackling that integration and the competition from companies like IBM, Salesforce, and the big market research players that are also aggressively moving down that same path?

A: There are two answers here. One is I prefer to be playing in a big market and owning a small piece of the pie than playing in a null-set market. Also, we are a small company and in many ways the large companies’ forays into this space are ‘proving the need.’ So I welcome them.

When you think of an engine or a platform, integration then is about partnership with great companies that build software connectors or process connectors to the engine. So in that sense, we are federating our model to include the ecosystem.

Q: It sounds like you are aiming for like the Enterprise Feedback Management space (or EFM if we have to make an acronym) by offering a bolt-on solution to other data sources (survey, CRM, etc..); is that accurate? Again, it’s a crowded market, so how will the Metavana solution differentiate from players like Clarabridge, Verint, Questback, Netbase, etc…? Is the algorithm behind the sentiment scoring powerful enough to rise above the field of established players? Also, can the Metavana model be applied to other types of unstructured data besides social media, such as blogs, forums, survey verbatims, etc…?

A: We believe we are broader than EFM. We believe we have accuracy as a differentiator and, further, that we can create categories for action better than others. So, yes, we’ll compete and customers will decide who is best! Yes, Metavana can be applied to all unstructured content/data.

Q: Getting to the behavioral drivers of consumer choice is obviously a major demand from brands, and one of the promises of text analytics is to deliver the “affect” of the emotion behind the text. It seems to me that your approach could be really interesting to look at macro trends and possibly even predict future need states but how does it deliver on individual emotional measurement?

A: Our consumer play (individual) is to be announced after our B to B play but your thinking is right. Affect/Emotional reading is the name of the game. I believe that we’ll be able to help with prediction of macro-trends but also for determining polarity and prediction for mundane and ordinary trends as well.

Q: Which firehoses or APIs will Metavana be accessing during the initial launch?

A: Still to be determined and announced shortly.

Q: Very cool stuff Romi; thanks for sharing all of this and I will be sure to watch Metavana with great interest! So last question: your career is a storied one and I consider you one of the great marketing thinkers around today. How do you think the online marketing ecosystem will look within the next five years and ultimately what role will companies like Metavana play in that vision of the future? Also, you’re obviously a guy who likes a challenge, so after all the fun challenges of launching a start-up, what will you do to keep building on your personal brand momentum?

A: Answer to your last question: Paul, thanks for the personal question. I’m really all about people, relationships, love, justice, and ambition. The three pillars of my career are People, Impact, and Autonomy. I think the online marketing space will continue to evolve but will never be the panacea people make it out to be. Marketing, to paraphrase the Bard, is a many-splendored thing and will continue to be a diverse, multi-faceted gem. What I do believe is that some trends are not “undone” or “rolled back” and the Social trend is now simply part of what we eat and breathe in Marketing. So companies like Metavana will be the new platform players that enhance the ecosystem and add to the individual and organizational voyage we all undertake.

I have great hopes for our profession and for my company. I hope you and your readers continue to hold our feet to the fire.

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Make Your CFO a Social Media Fan

Paul Dunay — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 18:00:01 +0000

Social media definitely pays off, but you’ve got to focus on the approach not the tools.

Social Media has hit the mainstream these days but the big concern on every product marketer’s mind has been how to justify the ROI? Never is that more true than at budget time. The purse string holders might harbor unspoken thoughts like: “We spend big bucks on those developers, customer support and sales engineering people. Why are you wasting the company’s money by giving them geek toys when they should be doing real work for us?

If you’re concerned about social media cost justification, you’re not along. A recent Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) survey found that only 20% of CMO’s felt social media produced measurable ROI and 62% hoped it may someday. If the CMO’s lacked ROI confidence, then just imagine what a CFO or CEO survey might have told us!

Social media definitely pays off, but you’ve got to focus on the approach not the tools. The classic product marketing approach to social media is treating it like just another broadcast media channel by posting press releases, sharing events, posting videos and expecting to see instant results like you get with other online media like banners, text links and search. All of that is a good start, but the results you need to justify your efforts will come by taking a holistic company approach.

Here are some real-life examples and I am sure you can find others when you start thinking this way.

Improved Customer Support

Social customer support can reduce customer churn and increase retention rates faster than any other program I have ever seen. Listening for and spotting a customer issue, responding to them and solving their problem in minutes using social media provides an “exceptional customer experience” which also unlocks the beauty of social media and the web in sharing stories of great customer service travel far and wide.

Collaborate with your customers

I don’t care whether you own a community or your rent one from a provider like LinkedIn Groups – but a community is a great place to create a social experience with your customer. B2B marketers often host bi-annual advisory boards or annual user group meetings and these are just screaming for a way to keep them connected via a tool like on online community. When you do that the results reported in a recent Jive report of over 2000 customers are outstanding. Lower costs, more revenue – a perfect combination!

Users
- Generated 32% more ideas
- Sent 27% less email
- Found answers to questions 32% faster
Employees
- Spent 42% more time communicating with customers, which led to better retention rate
Results:
- Support calls dropped by 28% (Lower costs!)
- Sales to new customers jumped by 27% (More revenue!)

Activating brand advocates

When you give great customer support or have a great product – why not activate the social channels to accelerate their word of mouth. See below for what happens when you do.

Find diehard fans on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn
- Enlist them for your brand
- Get them to make recommendations
- Build your brand with the power of their voice
Results: 5-9X ROI (based on revenue lift) by activating best brand advocates

Increase Engagement with Professionals

Used LinkedIn recommendation ads to invite endorsements and engage target users
- Earned 2000 product recommendations
Results: 500,000 viral updates on company products

Finding intent to purchase

You may be wondering with all this great social media conversations going on – is there anyway to mine social media to market smarter? The answer is yes there are tons of ways to mine the data to improve your content creation, SEO and SEM keyword selection, media planning (from online to tv media) and for lead generation.

Analyzing social media to find leads using a variety of search terms
- Both competitive and non-competitive search terms reveal buyers such as “replace product X” or “upgrade competitor Y” – any list of competitive terms paired with the words replace or upgrade can give you a list of potential prospects

Results: $250,000 sale found using social media and completed in 14 days

By now, you should be getting the idea of ways to expand your thinking on justifying social media. When you find others, let me know!

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Kim Kardashian Wedding – Social Intelligence Report

Paul Dunay — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 18:00:23 +0000

With the recent divorce of reality TV star Kim Kardashian, many people have started questioning the authenticity of the wedding, and if the brands involved had wasted their money. We here at Networked Insights measured the social lift around several of the brands involved to determine if they received a return in earned media value from their integrated sponsorship.

Social Lift can be considered online word-of-mouth. It’s a way to measure the ripple effect in media after an event either in conversations or the sharing of content. Download the Social Intelligence Report – Kim Kardashian Wedding to learn if brands like Vera Wang, People Magazine and Perrier-Jouet received social lift from their association with Kim Kardashian.

In this report you will discover:

The earned brand value from celebrity endorsement
Why branded conversations in social media are important
Which brand received the most ROI for their sponsorship

While brands may still be uncertain about their optimal balance of paid, owned and earned media, the value of celebrity endorsement and how it impacts branded conversations is clear. All that is left to uncover for marketers is the right celebrity for your brand and target audience as explored in our Lady Gaga Social Intelligence Report.

What do you think about celebrities and their role in branded conversations online? Submit your comments and let us know if you’d associate your brand with a reality TV star.

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Use Facebook Data to Unlock Consumer Affinity

Paul Dunay — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 18:00:48 +0000

When I started this blog back in 2006 Facebook was just getting going but nobody had a clue on when it came to the volumes of valuable data that they would ultimately produce. Today we are talking about almost 1 billion posts on Facebook per day, the same happens on Twitter every 4 days.

When I first saw the way in which Facebook data could combine with Twitter data, blog, forum, search and web data to make a rich profile of your consumer – I was blown away by the possibilities of knowing your customer better and knowing what really makes them tick.

Check out me and Dr Manuel Aparicio from Saffron Technology discuss the possibilities of harnessing the power of Social Data on yBCtv!

Special thanks to George Barker, the man behind the video magic, over at yourBusinessChannel the people who love “telling business stories and getting them out via a network of networks” for producing this video. See yourBusinessChannel for more videos with key thought leaders on the topic of social media and beyond.

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