Social Sights

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Hi Readers,

Today we’re moving the SocialSites blog to a new platform, Wordpress. The new url for the blog is: http://blog.networkedinsights.com. With this change there will be a new RSS feed as well so please update your reader with the new link: http://blog.networkedinsights.com/index.php/feed/.

thank you,

Alex Fortney
Marketing & Community Manager
@alexfortney

Does monitoring provide the confidence and omniscience you need?

So, you want to monitor a brand, or many brands. You want to know everything that is being said about your brand online, no matter who is saying it or where. You want to know everything and you want to be sure that you know everything. You want confidence and omniscience.

Until recently, the best solution for many of us has been something like Google Alerts. You enter your search terms (“Macintosh OR Mac -cheese -Fleetwood” and so on) and you get tens, hundreds, or even thousands of items a day; you know everything.

Or do you? How capable are you, as a human being, at finding the most important information in a sea of data? Let’s take a shot at figuring that out.

On the plus side, people are very sophisticated text processors. We are highly skilled at reading a piece of text, understanding its meaning, and placing it in context with other information about the brand we are monitoring. We are very good at knowing what’s important.

But how do those skills scale at the volume we’re dealing with on the web? The problem isn’t “how skilled are you?” but “how much can you read?”.

Let’s say that you need to monitor the Macintosh brand. A quick search of Google Groups for “Macintosh OR Mac -cheese -Fleetwood” returns about 5,750,000 posts over the last 3 months; that’s about 64,000 posts per day. So, if you read 10 posts an hour, for 16 hours a day, for three months straight, you’d cover less than 0.3% of the posts about Macintosh computers!

Even with your tremendous ability to identify important content, you would be missing up to 99.7% of the posts concerning your brand. And, don’t forget, your time has been completely monopolized by one brand, so you are completely ignoring 100% of the rest of your brands (not to mention your family, social life, and general hygiene).

So, if you truly want confidence and omniscience, you do not want a service that gives you a bunch of posts to read, you do not want a monitoring solution. What you need is a system capable of processing all of your posts and finding the important information for you. This would free up your time to perform the important in-depth analysis for which there is only one tool: your human brain!

T.R. Fitzgibbon

Senior R&D Engineer
Networked Insights

New Voices

Starting next week we’re going to be featuring blog content from a wider group of people here at Networked Insights. Everyone knows that the Social Media landscape is in constant motion and I want to pull back the covers a bit and give you a glimpse of the many angles we are working at to stay on the leading edge of this wave. The coolest thing about Networked Insights is that every day I have the opportunity to learn something new from my colleagues. I’m constantly fascinated by the depth of knowledge required to meet the challenge of making sense of such massive amounts of content that we face on the web today. It’s a great puzzle to solve and I’m glad to be a part of it. So, the first post from R&D will be on Monday, and you can look forward to many more from all of us here at Networked Insights. Dan

CMOs and The Agency of The Future

In the past six weeks I have had many people ask me what I think the future of the agency world will look like. There are many opinions on this: Dave Armano, Pete Blackshaw (yes I know he is from Old Man Nielsen) and of course Martin Sorrell, to name a few.

I’ve been thinking about this for a while and I have landed on a must-have for the agency of the future.  But before I go there consider this: The CMO is the shortest-lived role in the executive suite at just 28 months.  Now, more than ever, CMOs are looking for ways to show their CEOs and CFOs that the money they spend is working to drive sales and contribute to the bottom line.

If you are a CMO how do you do this?  Even in public companies it is rare to hear the CMO on the earnings call; it is usually the CEO and CFO.  The CEO and CFO have  dashboards that give reports on measures such as KPIs, DSOs,  sales cycles, and product defects.  These dashboards make them very efficient and give them the ability to get real-time feedback and make quick decisions.

Now consider Marketing, there are dashboards for Marketers but most of them focus on advertising and many of them are used mainly by the CMO’s agency, for example, DART by Doubleclick, Hitwise, and any number of custom, home-grown dashboards.  They all focused on one piece of marketing, advertising, but I don’t think they necessarily deal with the business of marketing.

Certainly some of these dashboards are valuable. Take for example how they are used in the pitch process: Wrigley was recently won by Mediavest, a Publicis company; Fridays was recently won by Starcom, also a Publicis company. Having sat in on a couple of these pitches it’s interesting to note that it’s not until the dashboard comes out that the client really sits up in their seat.  CMOs take notice because they see something that their fellow C-level execs are using to manage their parts of the businesses.  Unfortunately most of these clients will never see that dashboard again after it leaves that presentation.

So the Agency of the Future will need a dashboard, similar to that of what the CEO and CFO use. It will be as valuable to the agency as it will be to the Wall Street analyst who is rating the companies stock. It will focus on the business of marketing and be usable by anyone who touches marketing.  It will be a dashboard that allows a CMO and their marketing team to manage and measure all of their marketing spend and get real-time feedback from the market.

We are always looking for ways we can improve and ways we can meet market needs. So if you’re a CMO, take a look at what we have built into our dashboard, SocialSense. We have taken the first step in focusing on the business of marketing. What other problems should we be working on?

SxSW Old Man Nielsen Versus New Market Research Videos

To all of you that requested a video of the smackdown that took place at SxSW the video’s are below and are also available on our youtube channel.

This first clip is my opening describing the difference between data and actionable insight.

2.  This clip starts the panel discussion by opening up on Measurement.  This is the first blow to Nielsen… when the impression approach is challenged by Jim Schroer.

3. The role of the Vocal Minority and the Silent Majority

4.  Free tools and my good friend David Churbuck

5.  Examples of what works

6.  Improving your aim when it comes to advertising planning and buying

7.  Q&A

…. and the winner is…. you decide.

Share and Share Alike SXSW09

I have finally recovered from my fabulous journey to SXSW09.  It was great to catch up with so many of you and learn of your tales and adventures across the social web.  Thanks to all of you that attended the smackdown between Networked Insights and Nielsen.  For those of you not there we had a sell out crowd with standing room only, and great questions.  I will be blogging again later this week with the video feed from the talk.  In the meantime the slides are at the bottom of this post.  Additionally, I wanted to clarify one stat I was challenged on at the event, that of advertising effectiveness.  I said “1% of ad spend works the other 99% is wasted”  It turns out I was being generous.  According to eyeblaster banner ads had a .09% click through rate last year.  Much worse than my 1% number.SXSW09 Old Man Nielsen Vs New Market Research View more presentations from dneely40.

New Market Research vs. Old Man Nielsen

Today I leave to head to SXSW. About four months ago Hugh Forrest at SXSW called me and told me we had been selected to speak at the interactive conference. We were ecstatic here at Networked Insights, but had no idea how big it was that we had accomplished this. I am told by a number of my friends and colleagues that this was quite an accomplishment given that this was out first time submitting. One of my friends, Penelope Trunk (@penelopetrunk), asked how we did it… Hugh told me it was our title. So, on Monday March 16th at 3:30 in room 10 we will have the battle royal, Neely versus Nielsen with some added flare from Chief Troublemaker Dave McClure (@davemcclure) and Marketing Oracle Jim Schroer.

After thinking about the title we submitted, Old Man Nielsen Vs. New Market Research, and how it was selected, I started thinking about a topic we talk about quite frequently, RELEVANCE. Companies need to figure out how they stay relevant in a customer-controlled world: spraying your message is no longer enough. Spraying your message is like being a vendor and crashing a table of conference attendees who were talking about Madison WI and their love of it and you start talking about your offering. (A real story I will share sometime of a vendor who did just this.) At Networked Insights we constantly strive to help our customers stay relevant: giving companies relevant messages (language) for their advertising, PR, and product materials; telling them where to use this relevant message; and telling them the location of the relevant people they should share this message with. As our new homepage (www.networkedinsights.com) states, “We tell you the 5 things you should be doing not the 50 things you could be doing.” We were selected by SXSW because we were relevant in our message. How are you staying relevant? Are you still relevant?

Come and join us Monday March 16th at 3:30 in room 10 and join the battle royal and learn more about staying relevant.

And the Oscar goes to… “Measuring the Social”

If Robert Downey, Jr. walks up to receive his Oscar on Sunday night for best supporting actor in the movie Tropic Thunder, not as many people will be as astonished as you would think. This and other surprises around who the Oscar should really go to are part of Networked Insights’ latest Measure the Social Report. We used our ability to measure social interactions to reveal the true fan favorites for this year’s Academy Awards.

Many will gather around the TV Sunday night to watch stars come down the red carpet and to see who walks away with an Academy Award. But millions have already been online reading, blogging, sharing, linking and rating stories that feature the Oscar nominees they support. And according to our ability to measure across the entire social universe, these people are the true predictor of who’s cheering for who when Hugh Jackman steps on stage to kick things off this Sunday.

Our report released today titled Oscars: Measuring the Social, captures all the online buzz of the Oscars to predict which movie the public will be cheering for on Oscar night.

The entire concept of the Oscars is to build hype in order to sell movie tickets during a generally slow season. Bringing that buzz online through word of mouth is a huge benefit to the movie industry. Networked Insights has the ability to quantify that buzz whereby you can correlate the ROI of online interactions to ticket sales.

We ranked the top Oscar social winners in the most popular categories. And the ‘true’ winners are:

To gather data for this Measuring the Social Report, we tapped more than 17,000 social media and social networking sites, which included 3.5 million conversations per day and over 120 million unique users.

While the highlights from the Oscars: Measuring the Social report may not appear to reveal too many surprises, the interesting thing is how close, or not so close, the level of engagement is among fans. For instance, Heath Ledger, who many predictors are calling a ‘clear favorite to win best supporting actor,’ is only up three percentage points over Robert Downey Jr., based on total online engagement.

And while many are predicting Kate Winslett to be the winner in the best actress category, total online engagement shows Meryl Streep as the fan favorite.

What’s always surprising to people about our social media measurement approach is how different the results often are versus traditional monitoring and measurement. That’s because traditional approaches to measurement, even social media, lack relevance. For instance, other social media measurement only accounts for posts while ours factors in content that is posted, read, linked to, shared and rated. When you consider that conversations are happening online today, it only makes sense that ‘true’ online engagement is captured and utilized.

Measuring the Social Super Bowl

The Super Bowl has come and gone, but the online interactions around the brands that paid up to $3 million for each :30 ad spot is still going strong… well, for some brands. Many advertisers this year stated that their main goal was to convert TV viewers into online users engaged with their brand. Here at Networked Insights, we wanted to see how well each brand succeeded in doing that, and used our ability to measure the social to calculate the “Social ROI” that each brand saw from their Super Bowl ad spend, and determine the winners and losers.

To do this, we determined the increase in online interactions once the brands’ Super Bowl ads had aired by comparing the average daily conversations before and after the Super Bowl. We then determined, based on each brand’s total ad spend, what percentage growth each one saw per $1 million dollars spent. This allowed us to have an apples to apples comparison between brands.

The results were surprising, and begged the question for many brands whether their $3 million per 30 seconds of advertising was really worth it. Additionally, some clear trends emerged from the data we uncovered:

Overall, it was clear that the brands which came out on top had timely, relevant and targeted messages that resonated with the audience:

• Teleflora: Tops the list of winners due to the brands association with Valentine’s Day
• Cash4Gold: Came in second and capitalized on the down economy, marketing a way for people to put extra cash in their pockets. This in combination with cameos by MC Hammer and Ed McMahon contributed to the strong online engagement
• CareerBuilder.com: Also in the top three due to the increased focus on the country’s growing unemployment and the number of people that could relate to the “It May Be Time” commercial content
• H&R Block: In sixth place - as tax season approaches, Americans are far more concerned with their finances than ever before

On the flip side, brands that did not perform well were mostly the big brands that did not address specific and timely needs of the audience:

• Audi and Toyota: In a down economy, buying automobiles is not a high priority for most Americans, and this showed in both brands’ lack of Social ROI
• GE: A creative ad could not generate buzz for this massive brand that most consumers are indifferent to

To give you a bit more of a visual representation of the winners and losers, the following chart shows the logos of each brand and represents the Social ROI of their Super Bowl commercial based on the size of the logo — a “Social ROI cloud,” if you will.

It has been an eye opening Super Bowl for advertisers. The big, traditional advertisers are no longer getting the return they expect from the massive Super Bowl audience and more niche players are seeing better results than they could expect. Whether online or off, it’s all about relevancy today and targeting the right audience at the right time. The Super Bowl is no different.

Earlier in the week, we also compiled a list of the top Super Bowl ads based on online engagement around each advertisemenet and compared our list to the USA Today Ad Meter, which is based on surveys of Super Bowl watchers. As with all of our previous Measuring the Social reports, there were huge discrepancies in the two lists, proving once again the difference between the online and offline audiences. Six ads on the Networked Insights list did not make the top 10 Ad Meter ads. Full results below:

To gather data, Networked Insights tapped more than 17,000 social media and social networking sites, which included 3.5 million conversation per day and over 120 million unique users, and analyzed all interactions and post content around the Super Bowl ads. The data represents all interactions that take place between online audiences, including posting, reading, listening, rating, sharing, linking and inviting.

Out of the Dark Ages and into New Media

I was interviewed this week by John C. Havens on his BlogTalkRadio show, New Media Havens. We had a great discussion talking about new media and the way companies should approach it, even joking about the outdated mentality of those that are doubtful.

Companies are changing the way they think about new media, slowly, but surely. They’re starting to realize that it’s not about the loudest person in the room, but that it’s important to recognize the level of influence of their customers (or non-customers). Even those that aren’t customers can be talking about your brand and influencing others through reading, rating, sharing, linking, etc.

In order for companies to be more comfortable with social media, they need to start figuring out how to be relevant to the conversation, and that starts with understanding how customers are interacting with your brand in social media. Listen to the discussion below or Learn more here.

It’s time to come out of the dark ages!