Social Sights

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Tue, 09 Jun 2009 09:41:27 -0500

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?

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 15:53:00 -0500

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

Tue, 26 May 2009 11:15:00 -0500

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

Sun, 17 May 2009 21:51:00 -0500

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

Fri, 27 Mar 2009 17:02:26 -0500

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

Mon, 23 Mar 2009 13:52:00 -0500

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

Fri, 13 Mar 2009 15:34:00 -0500

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"

Sat, 21 Feb 2009 09:34:00 -0600

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

Thu, 05 Feb 2009 12:21:00 -0600

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

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 16:03:00 -0600

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!

Where is GM placing its ad spend?

Tue, 06 Jan 2009 11:04:00 -0600

Online, that’s where.

Following my previous video about UBS analyst Ben Schachter’s prediction that ad spend will continue to shift online in a down economy, I thought we’d take a look around to see if this was shaping up to be true for 2009.

JP Morgan also just recently issued an outlook that confirms online ad spend will increase, saying “although the economic news cycle is largely negative, we believe the longer-term secular trends that are driving the growth of online activity remain quite positive.” Turning attention to the auto industry, General Motors CEO Rick Wagoner also projected the budget shift to online advertising.

But WHERE is GM going to put that investment? In order to get real value, they must place it in relevant areas. See what I mean…

Games that are popular before, now and later

Thu, 18 Dec 2008 17:56:00 -0600

Our Measuring the Social report on gaming has sparked some interesting discussion in the media.

I put together a video to better explain how online interactions around games can affect advertisers and game-makers that are thinking about the sales cycle.

The break down, for the gaming industry, is between video games that are sparking engagment before, during and after the sale, which plays a big role in how marketing and advertising of these games can be effective.

There’s “no throwing shoes about it,” advertisers need to start looking for new sources of social media measurement and actually understand the relevant online audience.

Measuring the Social Report #3: Video Games

Wed, 17 Dec 2008 07:02:00 -0600

After visiting television ratings by Nielsen and music charts by Billboard, our newest Measuring the Social report focuses on the top console video games based on gamers’ interactions online as compared to NPD Group’s monthly list determined by monthly sales. As with our previous reports, we have found some interesting insights based on the differences between the two lists. The online, engaged gaming audience differs greatly from the audience measured by the NPD Group through game sales. The latest report is available here.

Even with slowing economic growth across retailers, the video game industry has been doing surprisingly well, which is why it’s a crucial time for game developers and advertisers to understand the entire audience, offline and on.

The new report exposes this online audience, showing that people are interacting with each other around video games before and after the sale:

The data provides specific insights for different players in the gaming industry. For in-game advertisers, understanding what the audience is engaging around online can improve targeting within the games. For game developers, knowing specific thoughts and sentiments from consumers can help inform future versions and updates, perhaps developing stronger game franchises. Even for those marketing virtual goods within games, customer insight can drive more relevant creative ideas.

Some key findings include:

4 of the video games on Networked Insights’ top 10 list do not appear in NPD’s top 10 video games, showing a discrepancy between sales and engagement around video games online

LittleBigPlanet has a strong social networking and creativity component which resulted in the game earning a much higher spot on Networked Insights’ list due to significant online engagement

While Guitar Hero: World Tour did not appear on NPD’s list due to its release date in late October, the game was number 9 on Networked Insights’ list due to the significant buzz leading up to its release through the month of October

Grand Theft Auto IV, which was released in late April 2008, does not appear on the NPD list, but holds the 6th spot on Networked Insights’ list indicating that it is still being played and discussed heavily by gamers even well after the game was released

While NBA 2K9 is 9th on NPD’s list, no sports games appear in Networked Insights’ top 10, most likely due to the straightforward nature of the games and lack of social interactions around them

Stay tuned for more Measuring the Social reports in the new year, and for continued updates and more social insights subscribe to our feed at www.socialsights.com/rss.

UPDATE: There is some interesting conversation going on at Kotaku who posted about our report last night. The main topic of conversation is that the data does not take into account the sentiment of the interactions — whether people like or dislike the game, for example. In fact, this is the next level of analysis that Networked Insights is capable of, and while we are looking mainly at interactions and overall engagement in this report, upcoming ones will begin to take sentiment into account, because indeed it’s a very important part of people’s interactions online.

Download the third Measuring the Social report here.

Revisiting Social Broadcast TV Data

Tue, 16 Dec 2008 10:08:00 -0600

As you may remember from our first Measuring the Social report, we took a look at broadcast TV ratings as compared to Nielsen’s weekly top 10 list of shows. We found some huge discrepancies proving that the online audience is a far different one than that measured by Nielsen. Well, we ran the numbers again, and found some equally interesting and revealing insights.

Jon Lafayette at TV Week wrote about our data and noted some interesting findings including the lack of “Grey’s Anatomy” on Networked Insights’ list due to low online engagement around the show, and the “24” prequel show appearing on Networked Insights’ list and not Nielsen’s. Unlike Grey’s Anatomy, this show may not have had enough viewers to make Nielsen’s list, but those that did watch are passionate and engaged with the show, resulting in “24” making Networked Insights’ list.

So here it is, Networked Insights top 10 shows for the week of November 17 - 23 as compared to Nielsen’s list for the same timeframe:

Stay tuned to the Social Sights blog tomorrow for our latest Measuring the Social report. We’re taking on a whole new industry this time, and you’re not going to want to miss it.

How does a ripple become a wave?

Fri, 05 Dec 2008 00:35:00 -0600

We’ve all heard about a lot about Motrin lately and we all know there’s a brand team and an ad agency nursing some big time web 2.0-inflicted bruises. You know how much a slip like this hurts; it hurts morale, it hurts your PR and it hurts your bottom line. There are a bunch of potential customers who haven’t thought about Motrin lately who are hearing about it now for all the wrong reasons.

The tough part is that it was entirely avoidable. We know Johnson and Johnson conducted focus groups with moms but we also know that traditional market research tools don’t keep pace with the speed of conversations on the web. Nor do they necessarily uncover the depth of engagement or sentiment felt about a topic by the target audience. The ad failed in several important ways:

its message about baby wearing came across as flippant
it reached an audience for whom the topic was deeply personal
it reached that audience in an environment (the web) where a vocal minority can dramatically influence a much larger group of media consumers

And that’s what happened. A small number of content creators created a ripple of negative sentiment towards the ad on the web. It quickly became a wave by virtue of a much larger group of media consumers linking to and interacting with the content. This in turn was picked up and distributed by major news media which prompted Johnson and Johnson to go into damage control mode and pull the campaign.

While the importance of content creators is obvious, the key to this social media story is the silent majority - those media consumers who speak through their actions on the web rather than by creating original content. They link, they read, they recommend, they share and by virtue of their actions they can act like a giant amplifier between a vocal minority and the wider distribution of ideas across the internet. And they strike fear in the hearts of lots of large companies.

Today, in order to build meaningful connections between your brand and consumers you have to know how your ad will be placed and who it will reach. You need to know how consumers are engaging around content and whether or not that engagement may indicate a potential groundswell (positive or negative) for your company or your brand. At Networked Insights we look at people creating content and we’ll show you how other media consumers are engaging with that content on the web so you can target your creative and your ad spend wisely.

Measuring the Social Report #2: Music Charts

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 06:41:00 -0600

We’ve come out with our second Measuring the Social report — last time, we compared our television ratings based on online social interaction data to Nielsen’s approach. This time, we’re focusing on music charts and comparing our data to the Billboard Hot 100 list, and once again, the results are very revealing. You can download the full report here.

Billboard’s weekly Hot 100 chart is currently based on sales and airplay. The fact is, nowadays, people are listening and interacting with music online more than ever before - just look at the way MySpace has changed the game for emerging musicians. This effect is true for big-name artists on the charts as well, there is a ton of social engagement around music online. While sales and airplay do play a role in determining music popularity, those metrics are becoming less relevant as millions of social interactions around songs, albums and artists are happening online everyday.

Our second Measuring the Social report was actually slated to appear as an exclusive in Billboard magazine. Unfortunately, some higher-ups at Nielsen, who owns Billboard, put the kibosh on the story because they see us as competitive.

Regardless, looking at the lists it is clear that the online audience is unique, and music companies and advertisers need to approach them and market to them in a very different way:

Some of the findings of the report:

Seven of the songs on Networked Insights’ top 10 list do not appear in Billboard’s top 10 songs, indicating a large discrepancy between song purchase/airplay and audience interactions online
While both lists consist mostly of pop and hip-hop/R&B songs, Networked Insights’ chart shows a different genre with two songs in the “alternative” category: Secondhand Serenade – “Fall For You” (5) and Coldplay – “Viva La Vida” (7)
Secondhand Serenade’s lyrics are popular among social network users as they lend themselves well to posting as comments and on friends’ pages as evidenced by “Fall For You” taking the fifth spot on the Networked Insights chart
During this timeframe, R&B group Brutha released an a capella version of Kanye West’s song “Love Lockdown” online, generating interest from the online audience, and boosting the rank of the original song on the Networked Insights chart to number 9. “Love Lockdown” does not appear on the Billboard top 10
American Idol winner David Archuleta’s “Crush” is third on Networked Insights’ list due to the strong interactive component of the show transferring to online interactions

Clearly, the importance of “the social” doesn’t stop at TV ratings and music charts — we have more upcoming Measuring the Social reports focused on other industries and revisiting the ones we’ve already looked at. So stay tuned, and for more social insights subscribe to the Measuring the Social feed at www.socialsights.com/rss.

Download the full Measuring the Social report here.

Don't Forget About Influence

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 10:35:00 -0600

When we look at Measuring the Social, we need to pay attention to WHO is doing the reading, rating, sharing, linking, inviting, etc. This piece is important not because of the the individual’s identity, but because of his or her influence. The influence of a person’s actions in social media can make a great deal of difference in how others perceive and respond to them.

For example, Tiger Woods’ social actions are arguably more relevant and influential to a conversation about golf, compared to the average Bob. At Networked Insights, we can determine if Tiger Woods indeed influences more members of a golf discussion or community. But this isn’t just true for celebrities. An active and relevant contributor could be just as or even more influential. Looking at the influencers and the areas of social media where they are is an integral part of Measuring the Social.

In this latest video, I talk about the role and importance of measuring influence:

Making Sense of Social Media

Tue, 04 Nov 2008 14:17:00 -0600

Over the past couple of weeks I have been asked many times to share my thoughts on how we get companies to do more with social media insights. The problem most companies have is quantity of social media insights coming at them… I met with one company last week that uses 4 different sources to gather intelligence across social media— now that is a fire hose…. I offer the following which is based on how we think about insights from social media in our SocialSense application, Level of Engagement is one Axis and Sentiment is the other. It allows companies to think about what is important and who should solve it:

It's Time for Defrag!

Fri, 31 Oct 2008 16:13:00 -0500

The Defrag 2008 conference is happening in Denver next week - It’s a really great conference that’s “accelerating the ‘aha’ moment,” something we love and are trying to do ourselves.

The conference has some stellar speakers and attendees this year, and I’m lucky enough to be one of them!

I’ll be speaking on the “Deriving Intelligence from Distributed Communities” panel on Monday, November 3, with David VanHeukelom from IglooSoftware, Neil Beam of Lithium Technologies and Patrick Moran from Mzinga. The panel’s moderated by my friend Deb Schultz, and should be a great discussion around listening to and learning from communities.

Networked Insights will also have a booth, so be sure to stop by and say hello if you are attending. Defrag is exploring all sorts of topics around social media and collective intelligence, so we definitely wanted to be part of the conversation.
More info about the conference here, hope to see you there!

Measuring the Social Report #1: Network Television Ratings

Tue, 28 Oct 2008 07:00:00 -0500

As you may know by now, Networked Insights measures the social. Well, so far we’ve talked the talk, but now we’re walking the walk. Today we are proud to release our first Measuring the Social report. The first installment focuses on network television ratings based on social interactions (download the full report here).

What is measuring the social? Today, social media measurement only analyzes about 15% of people who actually contribute content online. Rubicon Consulting puts this number even lower, at 10%. No matter the number, the reality is that the vast majority of people are interacting online in other equally important ways, and to truly understand the social, these actions need to be taken into account too.

Networked Insights measures the entire online audience, including those who post and those who interact by reading, rating, sharing, linking and inviting. Equally important, we also take into account the influence of each interaction — if Tiger woods shares a golf video with some friends, that interaction carries far more weight than you or me doing the same.

For our first report, we set out to measure the social for ratings of network TV shows in comparison to Nielsen’s age-old weekly top 10 TV ratings that have been the standard for television show measurement for years. Nielsen’s ratings have largely defined where and how much money advertisers spend, but as more and more ad dollars continue to shift online, these measurements are becoming irrelevant as they are not accurate across other mediums, such as online.

Enter Measuring the Social, and our first report proves this phenomenon. As you will see, Networked Insights’ top 10 television shows among the online audience is far different from Nielsen’s:

Some of our key findings…

Half (5) of the shows in the Networked Insights top 10 list do not appear in the Nielsen list: Criminal Minds (2), NCIS (5), Brothers & Sisters (6), Cold Case (7) and Family Guy (9)
Two and a Half Men has a strong hold on the top spot among online audiences, but is a distant fifth in the Nielsen ratings. Strong online engagement is due to Two and a Half Men’s “quote following” — a high level of interaction around specific quotes from the show
Criminal Minds does not appear on the Nielsen top 10 list, but is the second highest rated show on Networked Insights’ list, likely due to the psychological nature of the show and its complex criminal storylines
Likewise, the second highest rated show on Nielsen’s list, Desperate Housewives, has very low engagement among the online audience due to the lack of passion and pain in the show’s content

Online engagement around television shows varies dramatically from offline viewership, stressing the importance of advertisers measuring the social to understand their target audiences and where to spend their ad dollars. As economic times continue to get tougher for advertisers, making the most of each ad dollar is more important than ever before. It’s no longer about trying out campaigns and seeing what sticks, it’s about making your online marketing stick the first time.

Stay tuned and subscribe to the SocialSights blog for continued measuring the social insights and the next installments of the Measuring the Social report that will explore other topics and areas of interest from our unique social perspective.

Dowload the full Measuring the Social report here.