The explosion of social media data is having a transformative effect on market intelligence and research.

An Economist article from late last year states the context well: “Big companies now obsessively monitor social media to find out what their customers really think about them…As communication grows ever easier, the important thing is detecting whispers of useful information in a howling hurricane of noise…the new world will be expensive.  Companies will have to invest in ever more channels to capture the same number of ears.  For listeners, it will be baffling.  Everyone will need better filters—editors, analysts, middle managers and so on—to help them extract meaning from the blizzard of buzz.”

Being able to extract this meaning is a challenge – it’s not easy to do – but it represents a significant opportunity for market researchers to gain competitive advantage.  In a series of posts, we’ll be addressing some of the questions that a researcher has to answer before they can drive that advantage for their employer.  These questions include:

1) How do I make sure my research is based on relevant data?

2) Which social data are most useful to a researcher?

3) Is ‘automated’ analysis – for example, sentiment analysis software – usable by market research professionals?

Before we address the first question, let’s take a moment to consider the context.  The fundamental challenge to anyone trying to make sense of how social media fits into a researcher’s toolkit has to understand is that social media ‘conversation’ essentially has two different types of use.  First, it can be used for ‘monitoring’ purposes (e.g., crisis response or customer service); second, it can be used for ‘insights’ purposes (e.g., analyzing online conversations that might inform product development, or as a way to measure brand perception).  These types of purposes have different requirements in terms of data, but the way in which social media monitoring tools are being used today often obscures this distinction.  Buyers end up looking for a silver bullet to hit both targets.  The difficulty with that approach is that when you’re using a monitoring tool for customer service, for example, you need to see every message that might be relevant; you have to err on the side of making sure you don’t miss any content, so you undoubtedly set your keywords or searches up with that in mind.  On the other hand, someone trying to analyze social media conversation to understand whether their company’s key brand values are resonating online, for example, needs to make sure that they’re only analyzing relevant content; irrelevant content here only serves to muddy the analytical waters.

The competition between these types of purpose – an analog of the trade-off between recall and precision in text analytics, in fact – should be clearly understood by any researcher looking to use social media for market research purposes.

So how do we identify which data are relevant and represent the opinions that we want to analyze?  Last year, my colleague Chris Boudreaux co-authored a research paper looking at the correlation between online sentiment and an offline brand-tracking.  The research showed that there is a correlation between the two measures, but only after controlling for one or a range of factors.  One of the controls identified as being key to any correlation was making sure that the person commenting online had experience with the brand in question.

This makes total sense: make sure you’re listening to the right people.  Analyzing social media data without controlling for whose comments you’re looking at would be like sending out an online survey to everyone in your sample database; you just wouldn’t do it.  Do you want to listen to what your customers thinks about your latest product?  If so, don’t listen to your own employees, and don’t listen to your competitors.  The opinions of both of these groups have their place, but not to answer that specific question.  So how do you configure your social media research with that in mind?

First, at the author level, you can choose to only include messages in your analysis that are posted by the people whose opinions you’re interested in.  The way you define groups of people here may in fact map to your existing customer segmentation taxonomy.

Second, you could choose to ‘listen’ only in those venues where the audience whose opinion you’re interested in is likely to be engaging.

Third, you can make sure that you’re only including in your analysis messages where your product is being talked about in a relevant context.

Using these three approaches will help you make sure you’re analyzing data from the relevant people, discussing the relevant issues – giving you a solid foundation from which to start your analysis.

For information on how Converseon can help you get to the right data, contact jsnyder@converseon.com.

Credit: Internet Evolution

Here are three ways to create differentiated and compelling content, that you won’t find mentioned in blogs about content marketing:

1. Web Apps
Build a unique and compelling web application to drive ongoing, evergreen traffic to your property. Common examples include a dealer locator on the web site of a tire manufacturer, but that is somewhat obvious. If you really want to differentiate your brand, create an application that no competing brands offer, like, oh… I don’t know… maybe an online database of social media policies — a simple example, but that page has generated thousands of visits per day for three years.

What kind of web app could you create to give your customers something of value, establish a relationship based on trust, and keep them coming back? Bonus points if you build it atop an asset that your competitors do not possess.

2. Measurement
Do you know the attributes of your content that generate the greatest engagement or sharing? Most brands don’t. Most brands outside of the media industry don’t think about it at the level required to optimize content development at large scale.

3. Intent Research
When your marketers, or SMEs, or agency staff are writing content for the brand, they should have ready access to the latest search trends and conversation insights to understand the language that online audiences are using at that time.

Most use cases do not require the information in real-time, up-to-the-moment, but many campaigns would benefit from daily updates, if not weekly or monthly. When was the last time you wrote a press release whose keywords were informed by SEO and SEM goals, and the latest search volumes on those keywords? These tools and approaches iare growing more widely understood and blogged about, but almost no large brand is executing it with consistency.

2011 was a whirlwind here at Converseon. After more than doubling in size in 2010, our mission in 2011 was to focus on stabilizing and evolving new “socially-intelligent” solutions — products and services — that will come to market in 2012. In fact, we nearly doubled our technology spend in 2011 purposefully to build the robust infrastructure and technologies needed to help brands leverage social media to meet business objectives. Some of these are now in beta and others will be coming soon. On the services side, we doubled down on our talent and solutions — and expanded our offerings especially in the area of creative and social CRM consulting. In short, it was a time of great metamorphosis as we again challenged ourselves to evolve ahead of the marketplace and meet the needs of market as we move into 2012.

In fact, while we celebrated our ten year anniversary — and was cited by Shel Israel as the industry’s first pure play social media agency — we believe 2011 represented some of our most significant evolution internally. We did so because we see 2012 as the year of “social rigor” and have evolved our technologies and solutions in a manner to uniquely meet these market demands.

What is “social rigor?” In our experience, 2007-2011 represented a time significant experimentation at brands in social. The approach was often to seed the garden, see what took root, and let it grow, pilot, evolve and do so again. The result for some is messy gardens and far too unclear, in many cases, impact on business outcomes. This isn’t surprising, as it mirrors very much the earlier days of digital. But those days are coming to an end, quickly.

As we move into 2012 though, we predict brands will adopt an approach that applies social with much more rigor. This approach will be characterized by:

• Weeding the Garden: According to Jeremiah Owang at Altimeter Group study, large brands have an average of 178 social media accounts. While some of those accounts are effective, many are not. In fact, in our experience, many large brands simply don’t know what accounts exist, where they are, whose managing them or how effective they are. This is what we call Social Sprawl. We predict brands will necessarily need to map their social footprint, clearly understand what’s working and what’s not, prune and weed the garden of the deadwood and nurture those that are. This is a significant project and an area we are focusing on at Converseon through some proprietary tools and solutions. You simply need to know what you have before you know where and how to get there.
• Nurture the Performing: As the garden is weeded, attention and nurturing will be applied to those that are working or have promise. This includes new ways to best manage company overall social footprints and help align social engagers at brands with appropriate content and better measure their performance — and in some cases align bonuses to that performance. This also includes organizing and managing a company’s social presence more effectively to better understand what’s working, and what’s not.
• Measuring the Impact: Social media will become more data-driven. Social analytics will take ascendency to truly understand ROI. We developed a Social Scorecarding product in 2011 that is clearly answering the ROI question and allowing near real time optimization of programs, initiatives and campaigns. Currently, research from Chief Marketer found that two in five marketers have little confidence in the effectiveness of their ability to measure social media campaigns. The fact is, we’re almost surprised it’s only 2 and 5. But 2012 will help change that through some new approaches and technologies.
• Moving from Monitoring to Insight: Along with this, we are seeing a clear movement from “social monitoring” to “social insights.” The former worked fine to answer the question: “What are people saying about me now?” but is ineffectual at answering more core business questions — I.e. “What is it about my product that makes moms angry?” We see social insights on the ascendency as brands using social monitoring tools hit the end of their capabilities and are looking to “get serious” about finding social insights. This requires deeper levels of intelligence in the meta-data — better sentiment (including sarcasm, implicit, etc.), emotion, custom influence and more. Of course, brands then need the agility to move rapidly enough to engage in these real time insights and real time conversation ecosystem. And that’s where we are able to help.

To help our clients apply this Social Rigor and to expand our offerings, we invested significantly in 2011. Below are some of the highlights:

• Raised Social IQ: We doubled down on “social data intelligence” through increased investment in a system that doesn’t just try to replace humans in the conversation analysis; but scales their intelligence via technology. Our lead scientist, Dr. Philip Resnik, keynoted the Sentiment Symposium in San Francisco on November 9 and outlined our “semi-supervised” approach to this. We made deep investments into a scaled solution that works across languages that gets to more effective meta-data, much deeper intelligence leading to better and more rapid insights that answer key business questions. A white paper on this approach is on our website. Even Gartner Group weighed in on this in its Magic Quadrant on Social CRM by saying, “Converseon puts a greater emphasis on human resources, as opposed to technology, for analysis for error correction, and machine learning to improve its analytics. This gives superior quality of insight for customers…” What you can expect: the industry’s deepest social media intelligence that delves deeply into emotion, intensity and other key meta data that will be offered both as a data product (via API) in the Spring as well through our future Conversation Miner release (date tbd).
• Focused on Global Citizentry: We continued to expand our offerings internationally. In April, we launched Converseon Nordics through an office in Copenhagen and have continued to grow our footprint there. The market is rapidly maturing there and looking for more sophisticated solutions that have been historically offered in that market. Our Conversation Mining data is also being expanded into multiple languages (with 9 on dock for integration). We also have been conducting more social media research for large brands across geographies, including China, Russia, India, Brazil and more. BRIC is big. What you can expect: More expansion in the EU, as well as Asia and Brazil. The social media adoption in Indonesia and Brazil is quite profound and we are actively looking to scale in these regions.
• Evolved From Product to Products: With Conversation Mining “intelligent” data as a core platform, we have launched several new products in beta with key clients and will soon push those out more broadly. The mission is to provide a complete layer of technology along with our services that helps brands Listen, Operationalize, Engage and Measure. These include:
  • Open Graph Management – Converseon acquired a technology in September called Social Graphiti, it is used to both measure and activate (through retargeting) consumer’s “like” behavior on a brand’s eCommerce sites. We are marrying social conversations with social commerce. The product is going through rebuild and will relaunched in Q2 (and selectively in beta in Q1).
  • Social Scorecard – Measures the business impact that social media has on the brand. The scorecard combines public metrics (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube) along with internal brand metrics (web analytics, sales conversion data, media spend) to show a complete picture of the actions taken by the brand and the business impact and outcomes achieved. Scorecard is both a measurement tool and facilitates process and program changes.
  • Conversation Manager – This solution enables large brands to manage and track performance of their multiple social media accounts in a single location. Currently in beta with expected Q2 broader rollout.

  What you can expect: These products will be made available and rolled out more broadly in 2012.

• Merged our Social Business Consulting and Engagement Services: We recognized that social business consulting — which focuses largely on the business process redesigns required for brands to have “social agility” and fully leverage the value of social across the organization — and our social engagement services were two faces of the same coin. The former focused largely on internal transformation while the latter focused on transforming the conversation. We now have a holistic approach that can address both dimensions as needed and otherwise helped ensure that our services solutions remain industry best. We also grew our social media optimization/SEO, creative and mobile applications. In fact, we were named digital AOR for several brands who recognized that social is indeed at the heart of all digital marketing. We expect that trend to continue in 2012. What you can expect: New and innovative service solutions that can be effectively scaled out across large brands and geographies. We recognize that many effective solutions for brands — such as Social CRM — are all about people, processes and technologies (with an emphasis on the first two).
• Added Senior Talent: We have continued to attract and bring on some of the industry’s best leaders. This included the addition of Neil Beam who led social CRM at AT&T. Our consulting services continue to grow and evolve and are providing deep and sophisticated solutions for a range of leading brands. We also added Vidar Brekke as our first Chief Product Officer. We have also staffed up in analytics, market research, community management, mobile, creative and more. What you can expect: We will continue to invest in more talent in 2012, especially with individuals who have made social work in the trenches of large complex organizations. We understand how important it is to have first hand experience making social work at large brands so that we just don’t talk theoretically but can do the hard work of implementation.
• Grew Client Relationships (and Added a Few More): We are proud to continue to work with our very first client — Hilton Hotels — (now in its tenth year) and to partner more deeply with all our clients. We continue to believe in a hands on senior level approach to clients and our product of our work with Walmart, Kohler, Integramed and others (some of whom can’t be named due to confidentiality). We have built true partnerships with our key clients, which is critical given the need to “co-innovate” with clients in an industry that moves so rapidly. What you can expect: After all the internal investments, we will scale our services rapidly across verticals and regions. This includes CPG, Pharma, Automotive, B2B, technology, financial services and more.
• New Recognitions: It was flattering — and satisfying — that our work continued to get noticed by key analysts and others. We were finalist for Social Media Agency of the Year at iMedia, our work with Walmart won the SAMMY Award for Best Social Listening Strategy, our client Integramed won the SAMMY for Best Social Business (mid-sized), and our CEO was named to the board of directors at WOMMA (Word of Mouth Marketing Association) beginning in 2012, as well as being named a Social Media Allstar by the Social Media Society. Gartner Group and Gleanster (another industry analyst) also recognized our industry leadership with Gartner including us in the Magic Quadrant and saying, “Converseon has a broad understanding of how to use social media monitoring and analysis to effect change across marketing, customer service and sales departments. The company knows how to measure success and impact the key KPIs in those departments and how to tie into more traditional CRM transformation approaches. This is due to the CRM consulting and academic backgrounds of Converseon’s executives and consultants, and their consulting-driven delivery model.” What you can expect: our success is hinged to our client success. We will simply focus on doing great work and let the industry speak for itself. We do expect more full service digital agency recognition though as more and more brands move towards a social-centric approach to their digital efforts.
• Independence: We did all of this while remaining independent. After the Radian6 acquisition by Salesforce earlier this year, we were recognized as the last independent category “Leader” in social listening, per the Forrester Wave Q3 2010. This, as you might imagine, had our phones ringing with potential investors and partners. We are treading quite carefully here as we are dedicated to our mission and strategy of providing the highest level of social intelligence through a true social insights platform. We believe that space is much in demand and we have invested in the components to clearly capture that position. The results of these investments will be rolling out over 2012. We of course are always evaluating the best way to scale effectively and globally, but are pleased that we’re the position that we can thoughtfully choose how best to proceed. What you can expect: We will scale more rapidly either through select strategic investment, partnerships or more. For the first time, we have been talking this way with potential partners. We continue to push towards a 50/50 services/technology approach as we think that is the optimal approach to drive value to clients and rapidly evolve technologies based on real client feedback. We truly remain a consulting/technology/services hybrid and believe this approach truly is the model for agency of the future.

As you can see, 2011 truly was evolutionary here. But we’re not done. We are primed and ready to assist our clients adopt to Social Rigor across the organization heading into 2012. The good news too is that we are not — as is sometimes thought — an “all or nothing solution.” Our consulting can work with any third party tools or solutions to make data more intelligent and actionable. In fact, we see our technologies as a layer on top of traditional social monitoring to make it more insightful and useful. And brands can work with us either just from a technology perspective, or from a services side, or both. We have a “best alone, better together” philosophy. We believe we have competitive advantage in each of the areas we compete, but the solution works even better if used together. But that does not mean we can’t adapt to client needs and requirements.

We wish everyone a healthy, happy and “rigorous” 2012 and look forward to hopefully seeing you in the new year.

Santa’s bag is going to be full of iPhones and iPads this year, judging from the products people mention in tweets with the #DearSanta hashtag. Converseon pulled all of the tweets between 12/5 and 12/12 for a total of 10,680 messages. In these tweets, 25% mention a specific product by name in a positive manner for a total of 2,670 free consumer endorsements. Electronics was the most frequently mentioned product category, and Apple was the most frequently mentioned brand.

• Microsoft Xbox was the most frequently mentioned video game system, and Microsoft the second most frequently mentioned brand.
• Samsung’s Galaxy tab also had a strong showing, appearing in around 4% of #DearSanta tweets — this is the same number of tweets that mention the iPad.
• 40% of #DearSanta product tweets mentioned electronics products.
• Around 20% of #DearSanta product tweets mentioned apparel products.
• Shoes were the most frequently mentioned product type in the apparel category.

n = 800, confidence level of 95% and a confidence interval of +/- 4%

Customers are normally the best sources of product and marketing ideas*, and social media are perfect for harvesting those ideas, every day. In fact, one Converseon client recently used our social media research to dramatically improve campaign performance, simply by understanding how customers wished they could use the product.

Simply stated, they recognized a trend in real — and imagined — product usage, then tailored their marketing messages to fit customer beliefs and needs, in real time.

For example, see the following chart, which summarizes disguised conversation data pertaining to a technology server product shortly after its release to market:

At product launch, the server’s manufacturer promoted the server’s superior performance in business applications, such as retail analytics and cloud computing. During the campaign, our research found that customers were attracted to the server’s role in cloud computing, but expressed less interest in retail analytical applications. Instead, many conversations focused on the server’s reliability in data protection.

Recognizing the conversational trend, the brand adapted its marketing messages with significant improvement in the performance of the campaign.

In addition to improving campaign performance, social media research has helped brands understand how product applications evolve over time, as input into product development.

Learn how to use social media research to improve campaign performance or generate new insights for product development.

People are wrong in their criticisms of the Apple social media policy that was allegedly leaked recently, and here is why:

A company’s social media policy should support the unique qualities that make the company successful. In fact, the elements of a successful social media policy must exist in concert with the unique culture and business context of any organization.

In Apple’s case, secrecy has been a critical key to success. While many social media pundits claim that Apple should be more open, very few of those people are running billion-dollar corporations, and the notion that all companies should apply the same level of “open-ness” is, at best, over-simplified.

Comparisons to other technology companies abound, but that just makes no sense. Those companies and Apple take completely different approaches to differentiation, which has led them to create very different cultures. They also rely on different business processes to create growth and value. Many are well-run and highly successful, but for very different reasons.

And those differences are the keys to understanding why they use different social media policies.

The chart above shows the business factors that companies should consider when developing an effective social media policy (which I published in The Social Media Management Handbook earlier this year).

On November 9, Converseon’s lead scientist keynoted the Sentiment Analysis Symposium in San Francisco. It was my first Symposium event organized by Seth Grimes, and I was impressed with the quality of speakers and content. It was one of those that effectively bridged academia with practical business applications.

While we talk a lot about how to make social media drive business results in our communications and white papers, we have not often dwelled deeply into the science behind our social intelligence technology, Conversation Miner. Behind the scenes we have had a team of PHDs, including Dr Resnik, when he’s not attending to his professorial duties at the University of Maryland working hard on these problems.

As a wide range of academics, researchers and forward leaning brands discussed at the conference, the challenge of how to understand this vast unstructured social conversation to finding meaning and insight is one of the great technical challenges of our time. It is also perhaps one of the most profound. The implications of not just capturing — but understanding — this conversation for brand management, advertising, customer service, R&D and more is only now starting to become realized.

There are different philosophical approaches to this. One tries to solve it all though a purely algorithmic approach leveraging natural language processing technology, some try to have analysts find nuggets in the massive haystack of conversation, others use statistical analysis to try to find some indicative trends.

The reality is that human communication is complex and every changing. Slang, implicit sentiment, sarcasm and more are pervasive in social media. New words emerge daily. Some words change meaning. “Sticky” for example, probably wasn’t a hot keyword for a certain auto company before a crisis emerged. “Small” may be positive for a smartphone, but not so great for a hotel room. Keyword matching itself can be complicated and lead to false conclusions. Dr. Resnik referred in his talk that there has been reported by some that Berkshire Hathaway’s stock price is positively impacted by Anne Hathaway. It appears that the positive sentiment attributed towards anne also has a halo impact on the company in automated trading systems.

The complexities are immense, and challenging.

Converseon has made significant behind-the-scenes investments into our science and technology this past year that truly fuses the best of human intelligence and machine through a “semi-supervised” approach that is able to capture the nuances and insights that only humans can see and understand, with the massive scaling power of technology. Our heart is machine learning that bridges that human/machine divide. The results are powerful and only now being fully rolled out.

Central to our philosophy is this: the role of technology today is not to leave humans out of the equation, but to support human insight in ways not previously possible.

Or as a New Scientist article that quoted Dr. Resnik aptly stated, “Computers just don’t have the brains to solve some problems, unless we lend them ours.”

To that end, we released a new white paper coauthored by Dr. Resnik and our chief strategist, Mike Moran, entitled, “Social Media Insight Requires End-to-End Language Technology Capabilities,” that lays out clearly the various approaches taken towards sentiment analysis of social media; and why we believe, in the end, our semi supervised techniques are the best approach for brands looking for true insight.

A courtesy copy is available here.

We think you’ll find it good reading for anyone interested in sentiment analysis of social media and how to make sense of the vast conversations that are occurring. It is a good primer too on language technology for marketers at all levels.

And of course really understanding these social conversations may indeed soon become the difference between success and failure for many brands. We will be sharing on an ongoing basis some results of our approach as examples and hopefully a guide forward for others looking to find those profound insights in an ever proliferating haystack of conversations.

Happy reading and we hope you share your feedback.

In a webcast yesterday with Bulldog Reporter’s PR University, my fellow presenters and I discussed interesting ways that brands should consider using Google+ today. It was an engaging and educational session with social media practitioners of different backgrounds giving their two cents on Google+, including the following five tactics I suggest brands consider today:

1. Reach new audiences
2. Create content experiences
3. Position yourself as thought leader or trusted advisor
4. Improve your SEO
5. Listen

1. Reach New Audiences

Users don’t need to bring their friends to enjoy Google+. On Google+, users can seek out topics and then discover interesting conversations among strangers with similar interests. In that respect, it is more like Twitter than Facebook: Facebook has no value without your friends. Therefore, Google+ should be a good place to find and engage new audiences who may not know about you today.

2. Create Content Experiences

People who use Google+ are not looking for an alternative to Facebook. They want a better experience on Google properties. Create more content that engages and facilitate conversations around your content.

3. Position Yourself as a Thought Leader or Trusted Advisor

Ning tried to create smaller, niche social networks, and largely failed, but Google may actually succeed. The combination of Circles and Search makes it easy to discover and engage a conversation around a topic. That is not easily achieved on Facebook because most conversations are private, and it is difficult on Twitter because there are no discussion threads to follow.

For example, try these Google+ searches to see what’s on people’s minds within some hot topics, as well as fringe culture:

• HPV
• Lego
• diy analog synthesizers

4. Improve Your SEO

Its fair to expect that conversations and engagement around branded content and branded terms on Google+ will yield SEO benefits, just like signals from other social networks are already influencing search results.

5. Listen

Rules of engagement on Google+ are mostly similar to other social venues. Have your employees engage and listen to figure out what works for your brand.

Finally, consider that the gateway to Google+ will be Google search, Google Reader, Google “Flipboard” (Google is allegedly developing a Flipboard-killer), Picasa, YouTube, Google Music and other Google services that drive content discovery and consumption. While these services are poorly integrated today, they will likely improve over time, and will become important traffic sources into Google+.