It was shortly after we signed on as a customer of Techrigy's SM2 last year that we heard about Alterian's acquisition of the social media tools company.
Now, our company, Intrepid, has just been acquired by Alterian as well. Obviously, I applaud Alterian’s vision. Together, we will be able to provide a very compelling solution around social media intelligence. The growth in the adoption of social media has been astounding, yet we’re still just in the early stages. Social data is growing exponentially, and buried within it are gold mines of insights. I believe getting at them properly requires both a robust platform as well as exceptional human effort.
Alterian offers a world-class integrated marketing platform. Intrepid offers services that provide insights around social data. Together, we extend each other’s reach and complement one another’s strengths. Alterian customers and partners now will have accessible support around how to use social data. Our analysts can do the digging of the data that yields the gold mine of actionable insights.
As part of our integrated launch plan, Alterian has prepared service packages that will immediately add value to customers deploying Alterian’s SM2. Once customers and partners understand what and how to ask compelling arketing and research questions around social data, the platform will become that much more valuable. I’m confident that our social media expertise will be a welcome augmentation to Alterian’s marketing platform for both customers and partners.
As for Intrepid, we now have a solid marketing platform behind us. This allows us to be a legitimate player in coming up with over-arching social intelligence solutions that are more efficient and germane. Alterian’s global reach truly offers a tremendous opportunity for all of us to push thought-leadership in social data solutions across different markets.
It’s still a brave new world in terms of social media intelligence. And I’m very excited to have joined forces with Alterian to make our impact. Please learn more at Alterian's site.
It's been about a month since the Tiger Woods scandal was in the news. So what's happened? Based on an analysis using SM2 from Alterian as well as a few other analytical tools, we took a look at the conversations occurring in social media. As one would expect, the topic is not as popular a story in social media anymore. However, there is still a lot of conversation that is occurring. And interestingly enough, sentiment is still extremely negative. Apparently, it will take some time for Tiger to rehabilitate his reputation. Former sponsors that have distanced themselves from Tiger, seem to have improved their reputations. Those that are still associated with Tiger, continue to have a negative perception. Our team has found some very interesting insights:
- The busiest day for social media was December 3, after Tiger released his public statement.
- Many more women expressed an opinion than men, yet negatives equaled positives for each gender.
- Men tired of the story in the news much faster than women.
- Twitter sentiment was 67% negative to 4% positive.
- Recently positive sentiment has increased to 13%, but negative has also grown to 71%.
- The most watched video was from Taiwan, showing that the story had an international audience.
- Brand mentions decreased significantly one month later. However, those still associated with Tiger have high negative sentiment.
Please read the entire report below.
We recently had the opportunity to analyze the impact that social media has had on the wine industry. This study was different from past Lift9 work that you may have seen as it was focused on an industry rather than on a specific brand. We hope that you find this presentation interesting and that it also shows how we actually provide the "So What" that gets beyond the pretty graphs.
As you can see, social media really mixes well with wine. Via the use of all social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, communities, video, and of course, blogs, an extremely experiential product that works well socially has become an extremely infectious social media experience.
Some key statistics that we have found:
- 700,000 people watch wine related videos each month.
- Over 7000 wine tweets/ day
- Over 1300 wine bloggers
- The wine experience has become portable with over 300 iPhone apps.
Although data on aggregate wine sales as a result of social media activity is limited, we have observed significant new behaviors such as #winewednesday on Twitter and virtual tastings that have no doubt had an impact on wine sales, and word of mouth.
As a result, the adoption of social media by wineries has accelerated. Many wineries have an active presence on Twitter and even more have fan pages on Facebook. What do you think of this trend? Will we see other alcoholic beverages follow wine's lead in social media?
Jason Falls is considered to be one of the premier listeners in social media. He has written many detailed comparisons of the monitoring tools as well as documented best practices in social media monitoring. Today he wrote a great post which outlines how to determine the value of your social media conversations based on paid search keyword equivalent values. Jason demonstrates the equivalent value of search traffic equivalency (organic value compared to paid search cost per click) with his own blog as an example. By applying the paid search costs to actual traffic garnered from all social media conversations, Jason has determined the equivalent value in website traffic from social media. With some simple arithmetic and further work with web analytics, once could determine actual conversions or goals resulting from social media. This is very encouraging as it helps to put a quantifiable dollar metric on social media and further the ROI conversation.
Lift9 clients are probably nodding their heads as we've often discussed this type of analysis. One thing that we usually provide is a spreadsheet which shows the social media equivalent value as Jason describes above, but we break the keywords out by social media channel.
Social Media Equivalent Value by Channel
Thus, in the above example, we can determine not only value attributable to Twitter and other channels, but also which keywords. This helps clients to understand relevant conversations within the social media channels and how to better prioritize their resources. In the above example, 1/3 of the value of all forum conversations is around pre-sales pricing questions yet customer service conversations are more impactful on Twitter. By using equivalent value, clients can assign pre-sales people to focus on relevant forums and customer service specialists to answer questions on Twitter. Thus, the right experts (and conversations) can be applied to the right channel.
How else could you see equivalent value utilized?
As part of our sales process, sometimes we create an analysis report to present to our prospect. We'd like to share one so that you can get a better feel for our analysis and how we actually provide the "So What" that gets beyond the pretty graphs. Here is a report that we prepared for Nordstrom focused on a recent promotion they ran tied to the Twilight movie.
We've found that fashion, Twilight or otherwise, is very visual. There is so much opportunity to really engage and measure in this space. Integrating all social media channels works very effectively in promoting an event. Twitter and blogs were excellent channels for marketing the Twilight movie sweepstakes and the New Moon Fashion collection introduction. However, in such a visual environment, results would have been even more impressive if video and imagery had been an integral part of the campaign.
As part of the analysis, we manually compared the activities of a few major retailers(Nordstrom, Macy's, Neiman Marcus and Saks Fifth Avenue) on Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and Facebook. Some retailers are stronger in one channel than another, but none seems to have mastered usage of them all, particularly when the platforms are integrated.
Some of our conclusions:
- These retailers have all taken the first step in incorporating social media as part of their ongoing efforts and should be applauded.
- Fashion is a highly engaging, emotional, consumer oriented category. It is the perfect match for the participatory, engaging nature of social media. Thus, the retailers should be at the forefront of this activity with more dynamic videos, images, blogs, tweets, Facebook and MySpace pages.
- However, all activities must be integrated across the social media platforms and websites.
What do you think about the analysis? What conclusions can you draw from the report?
Lift9's business concept is repeatedly validated as I speak with industry leaders and experts. Now, however, comes the real execution points where we ask customers for money and continuously prove our value. That takes a lot of focus, time and energy.
During this process, I've thought a lot about momentum. I'm convinced that Lift9 is in an exciting new space and offer a viable differentiating value with its low-cost access to actionable insights into social intelligence. We provide the heavy-lifting research that makes social monitoring tools' outputs more meaningful to their audience.
Most companies in our space want to be upstream from us and provide social media strategy & engagement services. Those are critical and important components of an overall social media solution. However, it is difficult to ideate a strategy without the data first making sense.
Lift9 really does provide the "so what" of social media reports so brands can strategize, sell, market, engage, create, service, educate, and so forth.
So now, how does Lift9 create the necessary momentum? How do we create the velocity around our services, because the "mass" (or interest) in social media solutions is already huge?
We will first make sure that there is a proper framework for all the data that we collect for a customer. The framework will be built around the marketing and business goals of the customer brand. We will prove our value on each and every output for our customers. We will focus on targeted listening so that the mountain of data doesn't intimidate us from finding the diamonds in the data. Lift9, with its research center, will listen across different data sets in today's multi-channel consumer environment. We will also work with strategic partners to make sure that the customer receives complete solutions for their needs.
Right now, our inertia will come from a few partner customers. This starts the momentum, which we don't take lightly. Momentum can go one of two ways -- positively or negatively. We must remain customer-centric and continuously prove our value. That is our commitment to our customers and to ourselves.
- John Song
Ever been at a party when a person recites some interesting stats?
"Did you know that Washington DC has the largest disproportional number of females to males of all major US cities?" "Did you know that 47% of all ventured-back American startup companies had a founder or co-founder who was born outside the US?"
Sure you have. Most react to such insights with genuine initial interest, but then quickly move onto other topics. The stats serve mainly as entertainment value.
Well, some of the social media monitoring reports come off the same way. Initially, they are interesting tidbits and fun to review, but the takeaways are at times very shallow. The reviewers of such information don't always have the time or the proper structure to dig deeper to find actionable results.
Pretty graphs and reports are only worth the paper that they are printed on unless that information provides actionable insights that lead to moving toward a desired goal. This could mean asking more penetrating questions that once answered lead to such compelling insights. This is a fluid circular process of gathering data, analysis, aligning with marketing goals, filtering out actionable insights, implementation, measurement. Standard reports, therefore, generally fall short as it only gathers data with cursory insights.
That is why when I really want to have a meaningful conversation, it is usually one-on-one or in small groups, and not at a party. For social media reports, ask the "so what?" and make the information come alive and actionable.
A very interesting survey was released by PR Week and communications firm, MS&L today, 2009 Social Media Survey. In online interviews with over 200 CMOs, the survey found that most companies did not act upon social media feedback or research to improve their campaigns or products. 70% of senior marketers said that they have never made changes to their products or campaigns in response to their listening efforts. As if that wasn't shocking enough, almost half (43%) wouldn't use social media as part of a marketing program due to lack of knowledge and expertise! Of course, the ROI question was big - 39% said they are not convinced of its value or ROI. Sounds like an opportunity for educating some folks.
John Song of Lift9 presented his thoughts of 'Timing and Teamwork' at the Reinvention Forum last week. Here is a summary and further thoughts by Pam Hoelzle, the founder of the forum.
Hello and welcome to Lift9's blog.
We will be following social media developments and insights and sharing them with our friends and audience. We welcome all feedback and look forward to engaging with you.
-Lift9 team