The recent malaise brought about by this month’s collapse of the Dow Jones Industrial Average and worsening economic conditions have brought into sharp relief the budgeting challenges marketers face in 2009 and beyond. Despite the economic doom and gloom, understanding who your customers and potential customers are and what they are saying about your company, your brand, and your products is as important ever. How do market research groups continue their focus on brand analyses and customer insight?

Leveraging social media by listening to, monitoring, and most importantly understanding the content and themes emerging from unstructured text (conversational) data is a cost-effective alternative to more costly primary research initiatives such as surveys and focus groups. In the best of times, social media analyses can play a supporting and synthetic role by augmenting primary research findings with insights derived from consumers about products or brands. Weaving social media research into traditional market research creates a more holistic approach to understanding customer attitudes and opinions, based on semantic analyses of publicly available content. In times of budgetary constraints and cutbacks, social media analytics can actually play a more prominent role as an alternative to more resource-intensive market research techniques.

“The world’s greatest focus group” is “out there” constantly discussing your company, your products, and your brands. Monitoring conversations through budgetary lulls enables companies to keep fingertips on the pulse of consumer brand and product discussions. Well-conducted social media research will also suggest areas of interest for traditional approaches to research once budgets have been restored to pre-apocalyptic levels. Using social media to research consumer attitudes has several advantages over traditional approaches:

1. cost-effective

2. no selection bias

3. cost-effective

4. no experimenter bias (these conversations are unsolicited and unedited and unaltered by response-bias associated with the presence of a moderator)

5. cost-effective

6. open-ended (conversations are user-generated content (UGC) as compared to conjoint analyses or survey approaches that fundamentally involve constrained choices

7. cost-effective

Finally, providers like Ripple6 specialize in integrating social media based consumer research within dedicated online communities. Price points for more comprehensive and rigorous approaches to online market research may vary but the point is that more, not less, attention being paid to online consumer content and sentiment.

So, if budgetary cuts have been handed to you and you’d like to keep an ear to the ground and continue to listen to your consumers and prospects, consider the Internet and the conversations taking place every minute as a bountiful and alternative source of consumer or brand marketing insights and data mining.

Tags: Social Media Analytics, Social Media Monitoring, Uncategorized // Add Comment »

In his recent book, “What Sticks”, Rex Briggs estimated that over one-third of the $300 billion dollars in annual advertising spend in 2006 was wasted. Of this amount, approximately $23 billion dollars was wasted simply because the allocation of media spend across channels was not optimal. Put another way, re-allocating media dollars to channels that work harder for your brand or products can optimize your marketing spend to the tune of billions of dollars.

Last week, I was honored to be one of the panelists associated with a very interesting measurement discussion. The purpose of this panel was to explore how industry is progressing in developing digital marketing metrics to drive more consistent and higher ROI through less advertising spend waste– with better optimization of media mix, combined with a data-driven digital marketing approach. This session was part of a “digital immersion day”, hosted by McCann Worldwide in San Francisco for one of their clients. I was joined on the panel by Dan Neely of Networked Insights, Konrad Feldman from quantcast, and Will Hodgman from Comscore (M: Metrics), so a wide range of measurement angles was represented.

Anna Banks with McCann expertly moderated a vibrant discussion by posing challenging measurement questions, including examples such as:

· Can digital and social media metrics be used as leading indicators of business? Which ones?

· How can companies quantitatively understand the lift that active participation in social networks can give to their lead generation efforts? What about PR? What about aircover advertising?

· What’s the potential of Atlas’ engagement mapping, or other similar mechanisms to track the impact of a series marketing tactics (or user actions) beyond the last action?

All panelists provided well-thought answers that predictably highlighted their company’s ability to help drive towards a better estimation of marketing ROI. As a Collective Intellect employee who fulfills the twin roles of client services and social media analytics, here are some general impressions on measurement in a social media world, which were also discussed to some degree last week:

It ain’t easy (to estimate ROI)

Measuring ROI within the social media channel is not a white-jacketed, scientific affair (yet). And while I do believe it’s possible to move beyond the fuzzy warmth of the adage that “social media is more about the ‘I’ in Return on Investment”, measuring channel-specific impact of social or digital media marketing endeavors is not for the faint of heart. However, it can be done and there are digital research firms such as Insight Express or Marketing Evolution addressing this very issue. For example, Insight Express is charged with quantifying ROI across channels as part of BzzAgent’s recent challenge to competing agencies, the “WOM Guarantee Program”.

Doing it right may not be the best approach

Although it sounds counter-intuitive, digital and social media marketers need to make decisions quickly about what is working and what is not. Asking them to provide the inputs needed to build a complex, black-box, neural net or marketing-mix model– that may be statistically rigorous but mildly obsolete by the time it is complete– doesn’t help with the daily challenges of managing your campaigns. A “good enough” approach may work for many marketers. Begin with key social media performance indicators which, in turn, can be correlated with success metrics to gauge impact on revenue, customer satisfaction, or brand awareness.

Liberty! Give me the data

Database marketers and business intelligence experts are quite comfortable in terms of mining their own data for information. Can social media information become part of this world? The answer is a qualified “Yes!” However, there are fundamental challenges incorporating social media data feeds into database and reporting systems. Enabling savvier clients to make their own channel-specific ROI estimates (at whatever level of effort they choose) is an attractive option. Social media data can be integrated with alternative marketing data to help understand more fully the relationship between marketing action and downstream success metrics.

Conclusion

One of my favorite words is “nascent” and, to me, it describes the current state of social media analytics. There is no solid, industry-wide, currently accepted approach to measuring ROI for this channel. A wise person once said that it is not the destination but the journey that matters – as in traditional media, social media measurement approaches will become formalized over time and that journey will be fun.

Tags: Advertising/Marketing, Social Media Analytics, Social Media Metrics, Uncategorized // Add Comment »

Start experimenting with these ideas for social media marketing, and you’ll start to understand Web 2.0. Now take it a step further and listen to the conversation with analytical tools, determine your brand’s sentiment, find the insights and create authentic conversations with your topic mavens, then you’ll be several steps closer to using social media for your own purposes. If you want to reach even more definable goals, then Collective Intellect would be happy to help.

Read on for a topical best practice for social media marketing within the following reposting of the “fifty ways for marketers to use social media” from Chris Brogan. Jeremy Owyang went another step further and segmented the list into 5 groups. Catch that one here.

Idea #47, ” Spread good ideas far. Reblog them. Bookmark them. Vote them up at social sites. Be a good citizen.” Well, we’re doing our part. Read the full post here.

From Chris Brogan:

50 Ways Marketers Can use Social Media to Improve Their Marketing

1. Add social bookmark links to your most important web pages and/or blog posts to improve sharing.
2. Build blogs and teach conversational marketing and business relationship building techniques.
3. For every video project purchased, ensure there’s an embeddable web version for improved sharing.
4. Learn how tagging and other metadata improve your ability to search and measure the spread of information.
5. Create informational podcasts about a product’s overall space, not just the product.
6. Build community platforms around real communities of shared interest.
7. Help companies participate in existing social networks, and build relationships on their turf.
8. Check out Twitter as a way to show a company’s personality. (Don’t fabricate this).
9. Couple your email newsletter content with additional website content on a blog for improved commenting.
10. Build sentiment measurements, and listen to the larger web for how people are talking about your customer.
11. Learn which bloggers might care about your customer. Learn how to measure their influence.
12. Download the Social Media Press Release (pdf) and at least see what parts you want to take into your traditional press releases.
13. Try out a short series of audio podcasts or video podcasts as content marketing and see how they draw.
14. Build conversation maps for your customers using Technorati.com , Google Blogsearch, Summize, and FriendFeed.
15. Experiment with Flickr and/or YouTube groups to build media for specific events. (Marvel Comics raised my impression of this with their Hulk statue Flickr group).
16. Recommend that your staff start personal blogs on their personal interests, and learn first hand what it feels like, including managing comments, wanting promotion, etc.
17. Map out an integrated project that incorporates a blog, use of commercial social networks, and a face-to-face event to build leads and drive awareness of a product.
18. Start a community group on Facebook or Ning or MySpace or LinkedIn around the space where your customer does business. Example: what Jeremiah Owyang did for Hitachi Data Systems.
19. Experiment with the value of live video like uStream.tv and Mogulus, or Qik on a cell phone.
20. Attend a conference dealing with social media like New Media Expo, BlogWorld Expo, New Marketing Summit (disclosure: I run this one with CrossTech), and dozens and dozens more. (Email me for a calendar).
21. Collect case studies of social media success. Tag them “socialmediacasestudy” in del.icio.us.
22. Interview current social media practitioners. Look for bridges between your methods and theirs.
23. Explore distribution. Can you reach more potential buyers/users/customers on social networks.
24. Don’t forget early social sites like Yahoogroups and Craigslist. They still work remarkably well.
25. Search Summize.com for as much data as you can find in Twitter on your product, your competitors, your space.
26. Practice delivering quality content on your blogs, such that customers feel educated / equipped / informed.
27. Consider the value of hiring a community manager. Could this role improve customer service? Improve customer retention? Promote through word of mouth?
28. Turn your blog into a mobile blog site with Mofuse. Free.
29. Learn what other free tools might work for community building, like MyBlogLog.
30. Ensure you offer the basics on your site, like an email alternative to an RSS subscription. In fact, the more ways you can spread and distribute your content, the better.
31. Investigate whether your product sells better by recommendation versus education, and use either wikis and widgets to help recommend, or videos and podcasts for education.
32. Make WebsiteGrader.com your first stop for understanding the technical quality of a website.
33. Make Compete.com your next stop for understanding a site’s traffic. Then, mash it against competitors’ sites.
34. Learn how not to ask for 40 pieces of demographic data when giving something away for free. Instead, collect little bits over time. Gently.
35. Remember that the people on social networks are all people, have likely been there a while, might know each other, and know that you’re new. Tread gently into new territories. Don’t NOT go. Just go gently.
36. Help customers and prospects connect with you simply on your various networks. Consider a Lijit Wijit or other aggregator widget.
37. Voting mechanisms like those used on Digg.com show your customers you care about which information is useful to them.
38. Track your inbound links and when they come from blogs, be sure to comment on a few posts and build a relationship with the blogger.
39. Find a bunch of bloggers and podcasters whose work you admire, and ask them for opinions on your social media projects. See if you can give them a free sneak peek at something, or some other “you’re special” reward for their time and effort (if it’s material, ask them to disclose it).
40. Learn all you can about how NOT to pitch bloggers. Excellent resource: Susan Getgood.
41. Try out shooting video interviews and video press releases and other bits of video to build more personable relationships. Don’t throw out text, but try adding video.
42. Explore several viewpoints about social media marketing.
43. Women are adding lots of value to social media. Get to know the ones making a difference. (And check out BlogHer as an event to explore).
44. Experiment with different lengths and forms of video. Is entertaining and funny but brief better than longer but more informative? Don’t stop with one attempt. And try more than one hosting platform to test out features.
45. Work with practitioners and media makers to see how they can use their skills to solve your problems. Don’t be afraid to set up pilot programs, instead of diving in head first.
46. People power social media. Learn to believe in the value of people. Sounds hippie, but it’s the key.
47. Spread good ideas far. Reblog them. Bookmark them. Vote them up at social sites. Be a good citizen.
48. Don’t be afraid to fail. Be ready to apologize. Admit when you’ve made a mistake.
49. Re-examine who in the organization might benefit from your social media efforts. Help equip them to learn from your project.
50. Use the same tools you’re trying out externally for internal uses, if that makes sense, and learn about how this technology empowers your business collaboration, too. “

Tags: Social Media Analytics, Social Media Best Practice, Social Media Insights, Social Media Monitoring // Add Comment »

Per our press release about Collective Intellect’s engagment with Royal Bank of Canada to provide a customizable, real-time information to users of RBC’s direct investing Web site, Tim Wolters was contacted by Katherine Heires, a correspondent with Securities Industry News, who was interested in CI’s statistics and semantic-based algorithms.

Rather than using natural language processing, which “teases out” the meaning of postings, Boulder, Colo.-based Collective Intellect says it determines sentiment with statistics and semantic-based algorithms. “Trying to derive or score sentiment out of unstructured text is a hard problem,” says Collective Intellect founder and CTO Tim Wolters. There is room for improvement in sentiment filtering, he acknowledges, but the current technology is reliable when analyzing data about active securities. “For stocks that are heavily traded and posted, we are a pretty good indicator,” he asserts.

Please go to SI website for the full article.

Securities Industry News (www.securitiesindustry.com) is written and edited for securities operations, technology and processing services professionals worldwide. The bi-weekly publication provides continuous coverage of the latest financial technology advances in the Internet.

Tags: Public Relations, Reputation Management, Social Media Analytics // Add Comment »

Collective Intellect recently moved into a new facility with 10,000 more feet of space from their previous headquarters just down the street.

We are now stationed on two floors with the developers taking the ground floor and sales/operations on the second floor. There is some good karma with the space as Google had purchased SketchUp from here.

“After Google purchased SketchUp, the operation outgrew the space. The landlord negotiated a new lease with social media analysis firm Collective Intellect, which expanded its operations.”

Boulder County Business Report

Just outside our front doors is the heart of town and ever-lively Pearl Street Mall which runs between 11th and 15th streets.

The office is open without the need for cubicles as there are numerous free conferences rooms for client/sales calls within close reach of every-one’s desk. It is the perfect space for a social media company since conversation can flow easily across the floor without formality.

Our Address is: 1433 Pearl Street, Ste. 200 Boulder CO 80302.

Tags: Consumer-Generated Media (CGM), On Our Radar, Public Relations, Social Media Analytics, Social Media Best Practice // Add Comment »

Well it’s been a while since someone has done a really in-depth analysis of social media companies and here is a real killer. Philip Sheldrake, Director at RacePoint Group has broken the silence with an incredibly detailed analysis of the current players in the social media world. Download the full 99 pages of sweetness and make sure to subscribe to the RSS at Marcom Professional.

The eBook had the 6 pages about Collective Intellect including the following excerpts (that I liked) :

“Collective Intellect describes their last year as one focused on adding millions of new social media sources and improving data quality with highly automated categorisation and analytic tools. Quite rightly, they point out that analysis is pointless if you don’t start with accurate and comprehensive data. Collective Intellect must be doing something right to have attracted customers from the likes of Microsoft, Chrysler, Anheuser-Busch, Pfizer, Dell, Yahoo!, Viacom, Verizon, Levi’s and Adobe.”

About yours truly: “Collective Intellect’s Nick Sowden is the only staff member of the SWA vendors described here to let me know he’s on Twitter and to have subscribed to my Twitter. He’s also one of two to have invited me to link up on LinkedIn. To me, ‘being’ social inspires confidence that they truly ‘think’ and ‘live’ social.”

“I recall telling a colleague that Collective Intellect has “the magic dust”. Here are a few more things, additional to those above, that led me to make such an exclamation…. ”

Phillip closes with more praise: “In fact, the only other criticism I can muster up is the plainly visible fact that their reports aren’t as pretty as the competions’; not a critical desideratum and easily fixed… come on Collective Intellect!” Good point Phillip. We pride ourselves on data and we’re working on making our reports ‘prettier’.

To be somewhat balanced I should talk about Philip’s main criticism: “Interestingly, Collective Intellect dismisses social networking pages as “highly off topic and generally unhelpful”, and instead prefers to focus on the group / community pages within such networks. They also write off micro-blogs such as Twitter and Jaiku as “highly irrelevant”. That’s one perspective I can’t agree with.” Erroneous! I sent Philip some bad data (what was I think??), as we’re all about twitter. I twitter more than I eat… and I’m a hungry man. We’re already incorporating twitter into our data, in fact.

Thanks for the write up guys!

Tags: Analyzing Consumer Generated Media, Social Media Analytics, Social Media Metrics, Social Media Monitoring // Add Comment »

Tags: Blog Analysis, Social Media Analytics, Social Media Organization // 1 Comment »

Paul Gillin’s recent thought-provoking comments on whether and if a negative sentiment “floor” exists for Dell obscures a larger point - never give up! Using social media tools to further understand the negative sentiment associated with the “floor” helps build a business case (for or against) further marketing strategy and outreach. My response:

—-

A natural floor for social media tonality certainly exists, and no doubt varies by industry topics. However, as an employee for a company whose mission is to both interpret and effect change within the social media arena , I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that Dell has a unique opportunity to dive deeply into the negative commentary that constitutes the “floor”. Put another way, understanding tonality sets the stage, understanding content provides further opportunity for outreach. If the themes around negative content are inconsistent from month-to-month, a case can be made for a “floor” of constantly churning negative activity that it doesn’t pay to try and influence. However, if the themes emerging from negative social media activity are consistent, and no outreach has been attempted that leverages “the message” of this consistent negativity, the case could be made to further reduce the floor by testing different types of social media outreach. Dell may certainly have recognized this and have attempted the outreach (or decided that an ROI case can’t be made for it) – but it’s worth mentioning!

—–

Collective Insight helps marketers understand the “face” behind the social media buzz and can use that knowledge to connect in a relevant and timely fashion.

Tags: Blog Analysis, Social Media Analytics, Social Media Metrics // Add Comment »

On Friday afternoon, I sat down to speak with Ron Morris of American Entrepreneur Radio, to talk about social media measurement and the after-buzz of Super Bowl advertising. To listen to the podcast, click here.

Tags: Brand Management, Social Media Analytics, Social Media Metrics // Add Comment »

This workshop was presented by the very dynamic Avinash Kaushik. Avinash really set up the story well, in that measurement of traffic doesn’t work anymore (”google analytics only gives you a slice“). He spoke about know you need many different measurement tools to measure success of a blog and in general of online presence because the way content is distributed is radically changed. So, it is now much more challenging to measure engagement online, because there is no one tool that does it all.

Big lesson: Blog audiences build gradually, just because you make it to the top of Digg, doesn’t mean you are going to stay there. A regular audience grows gradually. He considers FeedBurner subscribers to be the most loyal, because they allow him to push content to them.

He is a unique blogger in that he writes long posts, not a lot of posts. His purpose is to write about complex things in an easily understood way, so for him, the conversational aspect of blogging is a key to his success — meaning, do people comment? His commenters write more words than he does (interesting).

He talked about Technorati Rank as relatively useless, because it is too general by putting every blogger in the same bucket. Here’s how I think about it.

Measures of influence are subjective — they depends on who the audience is. If you’re blogging about sports — about hockey — does it really matter if your Technorati Rank is really low? No, because if you have a large audience interested in hockey that’s engaged in a conversation with you (comments, links to your posts, etc), that’s the true measure of your authority and/or influence in the topic of hockey.

Tags: Analyzing Consumer Generated Media, Social Media Analytics // Add Comment »