MINNEAPOLIS, MN — May 14, 2009 — Iconoculture, the leading cultural trend research company, today announced the availability of its Social Media Analysis product, the industry’s first syndicated source for social media information and insights. This product combines Iconoculture’s expertise on current and emerging consumer trends with powerful analytical capabilities for mining social media.

Iconoculture currently gathers consumer information from multiple data sources. Continuing to build out the industry’s first fully integrated view of the consumer, Iconoculture now offers Social Media Analysis. Framed by key consumer trends and contextualized with additional syndicated consumer information (including observational content and IconoCommunities data), real-time consumer data from tens of thousands of social media sources, such as blogs, microblogs, message boards and news outlets, is now available. Iconoculture Strategists layer on expert analysis, translating what’s happening with consumers and why, to provide more comprehensive consumer insights.

Social Media Analysis provides marketers with a method of effectively “listening” to the consumer conversations occurring throughout the world of social media. The analytical tools provide a means to view the discussions taking place, understand the sources from which they’re gathered, and take a closer look at the positive and negative sentiments that surround them.

“The proliferation of consumers that are blogging, Twittering and exchanging information over the thousands of social networks is an important source of consumer information,” said Dan Frawley, CEO of Iconoculture. “By contextualizing and integrating the social media data with data from other sources and methodologies and then translating it into actionable insight, our clients gain a real-time look at the ‘why’ behind the ‘what.’ They no longer have to rely on outdated consumer information or methods to inform new product development, campaigns or marketing messages.”

Iconoculture is identifying and tracking emerging and current consumer trends such as economic and healthcare concerns, food/beverage issues, and green topics such as cause consumption and eco-moms. The access to real-time consumer analytics supporting these trends is fueled by Collective Intellect’s industry-leading solution in social media services. The Social Media Analysis product is available as an add-on service to IconoIQ, Iconoculture’s interactive, searchable content hub and the most comprehensive online source for current consumer information and emerging trends.

About Iconoculture
Iconoculture, a cultural trend research company, is the voice of cultural trends, illuminating not only what’s important to consumers worldwide, but also why it’s happening and where it’s heading. In order for companies to seize opportunities for developing products, services and messages, they need the inside story that’s driving consumer behaviors and cultural trends. Iconoculture’s perspective provides more actionable ideas to Fortune 1000 corporations and agencies, enabling companies to become warriors for their brands. In 2007, Inc. magazine ranked Iconoculture one of the fastest-growing private companies in the nation. For more information, contact Iconoculture at 1-866-377-0087 or visit us at www.iconoculture.com.

Go to the press release- click here

Fortunately, technology and marketing savvy agencies and firms also are keeping pace with the maturing space. There are myriad examples of how brand or product monitoring insights add value including augmenting SEO, supporting e-campaigns, deriving relevant messaging, and creating testable lead/demand generation strategy to name a few.

However, two areas are particularly exciting from our perspective in terms of providing more refined social media analytics:
• harvesting blogger demographics
• tying together brand and product attributes

Collective Intellect is harvesting publicly available demographics and blog author characteristics to help online marketers and advertisers understand who they are. Deriving a holistic picture of influential authors online moves digital outreach and communication one step closer to the traditional approach employed by direct marketers. This is true whether the goal is to understand “the crowd” online or Facebook users.

Collective Intellect currently places an analytic emphasis on a multi-faceted approach to understand brands, companies and products by viewing consumer perception through the lens of pre-defined (but comprehensive) attribute lists. That is, we take hundreds of attributes and consumer preferences and “intersect” them with select brands or products (yours and your competition’s) to provide an understanding that goes beyond rudimentary monitoring approaches. “Intersection analytics”, then, is the ongoing relationship between such attributes as “tastes great” or “expensive” and where and to what degree they can be applied to (“intersect with”) your product or brand. This real-time market intelligence is efficient, pure, and effectively augments any current understanding of existing brand knowledge.

Although frankly this entrepreneur may have the best approach to obtaining social media intelligence, we’d like you to consider attending our webcast on May 5th (below) to hear a brief discussion highlighting our digital communications products and how intersection metrics can help you with your marketing and advertising intelligence. Looking forward to hearing from you.

Published: April 20, 2009

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — A little internal test at the Mountain View, Calif., search giant goes like this: You take Google search results, slap them on a Yahoo search page and ask users which results they like better. Inevitably, Google wins — even though they’re the same results. Such is the power of the Google brand, arguably the company’s most important asset. But after a decade of near-universal love, Google is facing its toughest test. It’s still got a great product and a good story but it’s big enough that competitors are slinging arrows from all directions. And while it’s cultivated a fun, easy and helpful brand persona, its culture is highly data-driven and insular. It’s a combination that helped it win Round 1 of the search war, but may make managing Brand Google a whole lot tougher going forward. Not a day has gone by in the past few months where Google hasn’t been blamed for some societal ill, economic or otherwise. To read the headlines in the U.S., Google took away your morning paper and is chipping away at your privacy. In the U.K., citizens of the village of Broughton linked arms to stop Google’s cameras from mapping the town as part of Street View. And this comes after a year of battling blogger insinuations about it motives after CEO Eric Schmidt conceded that its cuddly motto, “Don’t be evil” won’t necessarily apply to all situations in the future, not to mention a public-relations ballast spearheaded by Microsoft but delivered by its second-most- important constituency: advertisers. Indeed, in the downturn, even Google’s economics have come back to earth. Search-ad spending, like every other kind of advertising, is taking a hit, and the first quarter of 2009 was the first time Google’s revenue actually fell from the prior quarter. The company has shuttered businesses such as radio and print advertising and even had the first layoffs in its history. “That is going to be part of life for them,” said Tim Cadogan, a former Yahoo exec who now runs OpenX, an ad-serving competitor to Google’s DoubleClick. “There are two levels of brand, its consumer brand and its industry brand. Its consumer brand is pretty darn strong. The industry brand has become more difficult for them to manage because they have become so powerful and explicitly ambitious.”  READ THE FULL ARTICLE

“Our audiences inform everything we do, so it’s important that we tap into the deep, insightful and continuous online conversations they’re having around our content and the way we leverage it for marketers,” said Colleen Fahey Rush, Executive Vice President of Strategic Insights and Research for MTV Networks. “Collective Intellect and its analytics technologies will get us even closer to our audiences and the communities they build around our content across the Web.”

“The rapid explosion of social media digital communications has created new opportunities for media companies to better understand and connect with their audiences,” said Tim Lefkowicz, President of Collective Intellect. “With the new ways that audiences consume media, it’s critical for entertainment companies to know to what their core audiences are saying and determine the influence they have on their brands. We are excited to partner with MTV Networks and help them to even better understand their audiences.”

MTVN will leverage Collective Intellect’s advanced influencer identification, automated consumer sentiment, theme extraction, and audience insight technologies to augment and strengthen its leading market research platform. The partnership will yield real-time audience intelligence for MTVN’s programming and provide MTVN a fuller understanding of its audiences’ interests, habits, and lifestyles.

About Collective Intellect
Collective Intellect is the next generation in market intelligence, offering the most advanced real-time analytics technologies available. Collective Intellect helps clients extract valuable insights from the vast volume of consumer-related digital communications. Collective Intellect works with a wide array of Fortune 500 companies to deliver market intelligence faster, more cost effectively, and with better data purity than any other method. Collective Intellect’s proprietary artificial intelligence solutions analyze unstructured data to uncover what consumers feel about brands, products, events, campaigns, categories, companies, messaging, issue or any topic of importance. Founded in 2005, Collective Intellect is headquartered in Boulder, CO. For more information, please visit www.collectiveintellect.com

About MTV Networks
MTV Networks, a division of Viacom (NYSE: VIA, VIA.B), is one of the world’s leading creators of entertainment content, with brands that engage and connect diverse audiences across television, online, mobile, games, virtual worlds and consumer products. The company’s portfolio spans more than 160 television channels and 350 digital media properties worldwide, and includes MTV, VH1, CMT, Logo, Harmonix, Nickelodeon, Nick at Nite, Noggin, The N, AddictingGames, Neopets, COMEDY CENTRAL, Spike TV, TV Land, Atom, GameTrailers and Xfire.

Media Inquiries:
Viacom-MTV Networks: Mark Jafar (212) 846-8961
Collective Intellect: John McCartney, Attention! (646) 280-8573

Just as in the wonderful Dr. Seuss book “Horton Hears a Who!”, the world of social media may have started off perceived as a tiny speck of dust, whose participants only elephants with tremendous listening capabilities could hear. Turns out that the speck is actually a world of its own and is a growing source of constant opinions about products and brands. “Listening” has gone well beyond the elephantine companies on the cutting edge of market research to be a mainstream source of next generation real-time market intelligence.

So what’s next?

Traditional marketers and research professionals now want to extend their knowledge beyond a basic understanding of what is being said by taking a holistic approach that includes analysis of who is speaking and what are the deeper implications for product or brand based on online conversations?

“Social Media as a Cocktail Party” has made the Amazon best-seller list, in part by claiming that “Social media is, unbeknownst to many of its users, the largest, best, most accurate market segmentation tool ever invented. This is true for groups that have self-organized online (we at CI call these categories “psychographics” due to the tendency within social media participants to organize around hobbies (“chess clubs”) and attitudes and values (“the environment”) as opposed to demographics).

However, for groups that do not self-organize online, how do companies begin to understand the basic demographic characteristics – such as age and gender – of individuals interested enough in their products to speak about them online? The amount of public information available about bloggers continues to increase and that, in turn, supports online segmentation efforts. Social media research is not simply limited to what people are saying but what individuals who are discussing your product or brand “look like” demographically. Technological advances in terms of harvesting relevant online content have given rise to what we call “intersection analytics”, which support a deeper look at where brands intersect with social media. “Intersection analytics” simply means that we can locate the prominent attributes (e.g., taste, value, quality) associated with any brand or product based on online conversations. Think of “intersection analytics” as the instantaneous, ongoing relationship between attributes such as “tastes great” or “expensive” or “too sweet” and where and to what degree they can be applied to (“intersect with”) your brand. The brand, of course, can then be compared to competitive brands in the space along the same dimensions to determine brand positioning, all without spending a dime on a focus group.

A recent post on the social media activity associated with the Oscars highlights the ability to augment “traditional” social media research with demographics. For companies with this technology, the future is rapidly becoming the current. We now know that it was a little boy, and one who shirked his duties previously, named Jo-Jo who helped save Who-Ville with an incredible “YOPP!” at just the right time.

We analyzed individuals online who discussed the Oscars’ and found that, despite the Academy’s targeted marketing efforts,

• men conduct more online conversations about the Oscars than women and
• Millennials drove most of the discussion

What about the women who are discussing the Oscars online?  From the online conversations, we derived information about their interests, their habits, and their lifestyles.  This rich understanding of audience demographics helps provide an avenue for the Academy to appeal to and grow their audience by appropriately fine-tuning their media mix.

We examined conversations from January 22 up through February 22, the date of the Oscars.  Over 1,000 authors for whom we could identify characteristics discussed the Oscars online – these authors were segmented by age, gender, and the location of their conversations.  We then performed a deeper dive into the characteristics associated with women discussing the Oscars online.

The Generational Composition

We grouped Oscar authors by their age into Millennials, GenXers, and Boomers categories.  Not surprisingly, online conversations were tied to age with Millennials driving the most, followed by GenXers, and then Boomers. 

Geo-location Composition

Not surprisingly, the U.S. dominates the discussion. It is interesting to note however how much conversation came out of India with the success of Slumdog Millionaire. 

The Gender Composition

Perhaps somewhat surprising, Oscars discussion is dominated by men.  Importantly, the analysis focused on one month of the broader conversations leading up to, and during the Oscars (movie buffs) and not on the red carpet gala (fashion),  which may provide some additional explanation for this disparity.

Cross-Affinity Analysis of Women Discussing the Oscars

Cross-affinity analyses provide a deeper understanding of the audience itself.  By passively observing social media participants, we bypass some possible biases associated with traditional survey based approaches, making online authors an apt audience to study.  Social media analytics can deepen the understanding of online audiences, which helps targeting (marketing or advertising) and messaging strategy.

Using our semantic theme technology we surfaced other components of online conversation for females already discussing the Oscars.  This technology allows us to determine in an open-ended way what else this select group of females is interested in and discussing online, for example:

Some emerging concepts – such as “Films” and “Oscars” – are expected.  Many of the other affinities – including celebrity gossip, parenting and children, and feelings helps paint a more holistic picture of this audience, which highlights the power of using semantic techniques to distill meaning from online conversations.

The woman who cares about the Oscars:

She stays up-to-date on her celebrity gossip, she may have children, she enjoys reading a good book, pop music, and games and puzzles; she dreams of traveling, and she discusses her feeling about all this and more on her personal blog.

Going beyond conversation analytics to audience analytics suggest specific, testable strategies that brand managers and marketers can take with regards to their target audiences.  By better understanding their existing audience, particularly their online audience, brands now have help with their digital (or traditional) marketing strategy. CI provides brands with the guidance that they need to succeed in effective word of mouth campaigns and to effectively drive their marketing strategy.

UPDATE: Due to a typo in the original graph (corrected) highlighting the top countries posting about the Oscars, “Austria” should have been “Australia”. In retrospect, this makes sense given the nationality of both Hugh Jackman and Heath Ledger. 

I participated in this panel back in November hosted by the PR firm Johnston-Wells of Denver. These guys are at the forefront of helping companies figure out the new world of social media and “the why and how” of effectively participating in this powerful distributed world of consumer influence.

The event was well attended by local companies in the Denver front range community and highlighted the range of emotional embrace organizations have for social media, from outright fear to competitive advantage. I spoke about effectively monitoring social media as an addtion to PR but also how to leverage the medium for market research and identifying the key influencers to proactively engage with customers and brand advocates.

Listen in right here:

The Digital Media Marketing Summit webcast is sponsored by BrightTalk

MINNEAPOLIS and BOULDER, Colo., Feb. 17 /PRNewswire/ — Iconoculture, the leading cultural trend research company, and Collective Intellect,the leading provider of real-time market intelligence through advanced digital-media analytics technologies, today announced a partnership that focuses on bringing the marketplace one big step closer to the most comprehensive, cost-effective consumer insights available.

This partnership combines the breadth and depth of Iconoculture’s expertise on current and emerging consumer trends with Collective Intellect’s powerful analytics capabilities for mining social media. Together, the companies are working closely on a solution that will provide the industry’s first fully integrated view of the consumer, helping brands and businesses develop actionable ideas for growth.

In the coming weeks, Iconoculture and Collective Intellect will unveil a service featuring a series of reports — on such topics as the economic crisis and its impact on consumer spending habits, green moms, current healthcare and recession concerns, food and beverage trends, and more — that will combine Iconoculture’s observational content and IconoCommunities(SM) findings with Collective Intellect’s analysis of a wide variety of social media. This partnership gives marketers instant access to powerful, cost-effective insights that depict a more comprehensive view of the consumer, versus dated insights processes that require marketers to gather data from multiple costly sources.

“In this current economic environment, it’s more important than ever for marketers to have access to robust yet cost-effective consumer insights,” said Dan Frawley, CEO of Iconoculture. “This partnership provides our clients with an integrated solution for understanding what’s happening with consumers worldwide, why it’s happening and where it’s heading. Companies need that inside knowledge in order to develop products, services and messages that are relevant to consumers — who in today’s market are smarter and are changing faster than ever.”

“The rise of social media has presented marketers with new challenges, but also new opportunities for connecting with consumers,” said Don Springer, CEO of Collective Intellect. “With the exponential growth in user-generated content, it’s more important than ever for marketers to listen to what consumers are saying and doing. By combining our social media services with Iconoculture’s values-based observational content and expert analysis, we’ve created a solution that puts fresh, real-time insights into the hands of marketers on a continual basis.”

About Iconoculture

Iconoculture, a cultural trend research company, is the voice of cultural trends, illuminating not only what’s important to consumers worldwide, but also why it’s happening and where it’s heading. In order for companies to seize opportunities for developing products, services and messages, they need the inside story that’s driving consumer behaviors and cultural trends. Iconoculture’s perspective provides more actionable ideas to Fortune 1000 corporations and agencies, enabling companies to become warriors for their brands. In 2007, Inc. magazine ranked Iconoculture as one of the fastest-growing private companies in the nation. For more information, contact Iconoculture at 1-866-377-0087 or visit us at www.iconoculture.com.

About Collective Intellect

Collective Intellect is the next generation in market intelligence, offering the most advanced real-time analytics technologies available. Collective Intellect helps clients extract valuable insights from the vast volume of consumer-related digital communications. Collective Intellect works with a wide array of Fortune 500 companies to deliver market intelligence faster, more cost effectively, and with better data purity than any other method. Collective Intellect’s proprietary artificial intelligence solution analyzes unstructured data to uncover what consumers really feel about brands, products, campaigns, categories, companies, brands, messaging, issues or any topic of importance. Founded in 2005, Collective Intellect is headquartered in Boulder, CO. For more information, please visit www.collectiveintellect.com.

SOURCE Iconoculture

Copyright 2009 PR Newswire