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 »

Social media agency Room 214’s co-founder Jason Cormier interviewed Collective Intellect co-founder and CTO Tim Wolters for a podcast last week. The wide-ranging discussion covered social media monitoring best practices and thoughts on emerging social media technology, as well as a host of other related topics. Check out the podcast on Room 214’s “Capture The Conversation” blog.

Tags: Social Media Monitoring // Add Comment »

The 2008 Olympics have already been marked by both shattered records and controversy, making it the perfect event to cover in Social Media. CI tracked eight selected Beijing Olympic sponsors— Visa, McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, Lenovo, UPS, General Electric, Kodak and Panasonic— over a selected time period of 8/2 to 8/13. We compared each sponsor’s Olympic-focused conversation from the six days prior to the Olympics (8/2 to 8/7) to the first six days of the Olympics (8/8 to 8/13).

Three sponsors in particular stand out as having achieved a significant Social Media lift: Coke, McDonald’s and Visa. Coke, when referenced near the Olympics, experienced a 17% lift from the first time period to the second. A great deal of conversation surrounded their Bluetooth campaign, which is the first instance of Bluetooth marketing in Olympic history.

Activity around McDonald’s and the Olympics increased 51%. People posted most often about their TV commercials and their large, temporary store on the Olympic Green.

Visa’s Olympic-focused activity increased by an outstanding 141%, showing the huge success of their campaign. Their role as the sole payment method of the Olympics, as well as their mid-Olympics release of the special-edition Michael Phelps commercial contributed to this drastic increase in Visa’s buzz.

Tonality was overall positive for all selected sponsors, although UPS/Olympic conversation accumulated a bit more negative sentiment when pro-Tibet protestors stormed a French UPS store on 8/6.

Although negative sentiment for the sponsors continues around human rights issues, the majority of these posts do not single out specific sponsors. Individually, these eight sponsors have been generally well-received by the overall public, and many have shown an increase in Social Media activity as the Olympics continue.

CI will continue to track the Olympics through the completion of the games and follow up with our new findings.

– Jackie Wood

Tags: Brand Management, Mass Media/Culture, Social Media Insights, Social Media Monitoring // 1 Comment »

Collective Intellect’s President Tim Lefkowicz kicked off the start of the 2008 Summer Olympics by appearing on the Fox Business Network (FBN) Money for Breakfast Show anchored by Alexis Glick which follows pre-market business headlines. FBN sought Collective Intellect’s opinion on the results of the pre-Olympic Sentiment around the major brands that are advertising at the Olympics, and we are expecting to return later in August with more interesting insights.

Referring to CI’s latest report, Glick, asked about how the traditional Big 3 of VISA , Coca-Cola and McDonald’s were doing heading into the Beijing games. Joining Lefkowicz and Glick was Mark Sunshine from First Capital to discuss these three big sponsors from the financial market perspective. Sentiment calculations list positive sentiment for VISA, Coca-Cola, and McDonalds. The other brands mentioned as part of this pool are GE, Kodak and Panasonic.

Lefkowicz predicted that “VISA was the Brand to beat running up to the opening ceremonies” based upon CI’s reporting.

A few highlights from the conversation are summarized below:

Visa had a positive sentiment of 67%, the largest share out of the Big 3, which can be contributed to VISAs campaign with the “Come Together” Olympics narrated by Morgan Freeman as well as another AD which features US Olympic team swimmer and gold medal contender Michael Phelps.

McDonald’s themes are much focused media campaigns on Olympic China advertising like “I love it when China wins.” Mr. Sunshine mentioned that McDonalds is actually down playing their Olympic involvement in the U.K. to avoid possible boycotts over alleged human rights violations by China.

Coca-Cola’s “Bird’s Nest” campaign does well with their theme of cooperation, and their embracement of social media and the younger demographics. Coca-Cola is a mainstay of the Olympics.

For the complete version of FBN’s “Gold Medal Marketing Show”, watch the following clip: http://snurl.com/3cw7y

Tags: Blog Analysis, Brand Management, Mass Media/Culture, Social Media Monitoring // 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 »

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 »

Techcrunch posted a blog about us.

“The service is most useful for marketers who need to understand how well their brands are being received by the media and general public. It tracks discussions about particular topics being posted on news sites, blogs, and message boards. For instance, MTV could decide to check out what people think about “The Hills”. Collective Intellect will use graphs and lists of discussion items to show how sentiment has changed over time, and where the bulk of discussions come from. The analytics can be refined by choosing narrower topics, such as actress Audrina Patridge, to see what people are saying about her in particular.”

• TechCrunch blogged us. Sweet, except for that UI piece. http://tinyurl.com/6b284y

Tags: Brand Management, Mass Media/Culture, Public Relations, Social Media Monitoring // Add Comment »

One of the questions that inevitably comes up when talking to customers about social media marketing is “How does Collective Intellect determines who the influencers are in social media?” This is a great question, because unlike traditional media — where you have existing criteria — circulation, source credibility, advertising rates based on impressions — social media influence is dynamic, not static. If you take away the top 3% of bloggers — the “A” list, if you will — what a marketer is typically left with is really difficult to figure out. Depending on what you’re tracking, there may be lots of posts from different bloggers, and heavy discussion on certain message boards and forums, plus video post sites such as YouTube might garner high interest in your area. The question is, which posts, which conversations in social media are the most important to you right now?

There may be lots of results associated with a keyword you search on in Google, or any of the low-priced keyword-based tools, but which results are the most important? Time-based search gets you just that — the most recent information. Certainly valuable, but how do you know of those recent conversations, which hold the most weight, which will spread the farthest, where will you get, so to speak, the most bang for your buck?

The question to ask is not who has the largest audience. The question should be: who — right now (today, this week, this month) — has the widest influence within the area I hope to impact?

So, if you’re interested in issues around dog food (to use a favorite topic of DK) what matters is finding the influence communities that have the greatest opportunity to impact current discussions around dogs, and more specifically dog food. Finding influencers in a general pets area might be helpful to a degree, but the more laser-focused you can get, the more relevant you are. This means what you are looking for are those social media content creators and commmunities where the content is really high value.

What do you think? I have some successful examples of this idea in action that, hopefully soon, I will be able to blog about.

My main point: Social media is a moving target — what today is an influential source or community might lose that status by next week or next month. Waiting for a quarterly report from market research may not be the best approach when pulling together campaigns.

Tags: Blog Analysis, Social Media Best Practice, Social Media Monitoring // 1 Comment »

Monday’s Wall Street Journal had an article about the current workarounds that advertising agencies are using to give them better metrics than just click-throughs. It seems that finally, companies are demanding from marketers better metrics to provide results.

Today, there exists no true standard for measurement online, even for just measuring click-through — Omniture will give you different data than your own data, or data you might get from another vendor. This doesn’t even begin to address the issue of ad blindness — where more and more people are tuning out ads online and offline.

Social media adds to the mix of things requiring measurement, and in some ways the conversational nature of it could offer more meaningful metrics than ad responses.

How does your monitoring firm measure social media engagement? We are right in the thick of this effort to map data to results.

The problem is that most monitoring firms are only giving you data after the fact, and are doing all of the measurement for you. I was speaking with one of our customers yesterday who had serious issues with this, because these are the same people who are making suggestions as to whether or not to engage with social media participants. Her problem? Why should I believe the monitoring firm that something is heating up and is worthy of engagement when they are also being paid to do the engagement? Isn’t it in their best interest to find ways to increase their income by creating work for themselves?

The better way (from my customer’s perspective) is to look at the posts yourself, in real time, to know whether a conversation is worth engaging in. So, this is a real-time measurement — something that is very subjective to the person viewing it, and probably won’t ever have anything but a company-specific standard.

Tags: Social Media Monitoring // 2 Comments »

A little less then a year ago we commented on how Michael Mace, an industry expert, posted on his personal blog that Research In Motion’s stock price was mistakenly battered by the announcement of the iPhone last January. He also made the argument that Palm faced the greatest threat from the iPhone.

A few days ago research group NPD released a report that seemed to practically quote Mace.

Here is what Mace said last January:

The iPhone as currently designed is a lousy device for RIMM’s
communication-centric users because it doesn’t have a keyboard and
because it can’t handle Outlook attachments.

the Treo has benefited mightily in the US from its image of being the
coolest smartphone. It has been a status symbol in Silicon Valley and
beyond. Judging from the reactions of the people I spoke to today, I
think that position is profoundly at risk.

Here is what NPD reports:

The iPhone’s lack of corporate email support appears to make it less appetizing to current Blackberry owners

Initial iPhone buyers were 10 times more likely to previously own Palm’s Treo.

Since the announcement of the iPhone, Palm’s stock price has been stagnant and trailed the S&P. Over this same period RIMM is up a staggering 133 percent.

Tags: Mass Media/Culture, Social Media Monitoring // Add Comment »