Big Data » Terametric Blog

Call us today (978) 261-3263

Archive for the ‘Big Data’ Category

The Science of Influence

Posted in Big Data, Inbox Influencer, Influence, Social CRM, Social Influence Marketing, Strategy and Analysis by Chris Selland on January 10th, 2012

All customers are not created equal. Nor are visitors to your website, followers of your Twitter feed, or ‘Like’rs of your Facebook page.

While companies often give lip service to providing all customers and prospects equal allocations of resources and attention, the truth is that resources are limited – people, money, time. These limitations force organizations to tier their efforts, and to apply more resources to the more valuable relationships in order to provide the greatest economic return – ROI – on their investments.

Understanding who our most valuable, profitable customers are – and supporting processes to channel more resources and attention on them – is the entire foundation of investments in CRM applications, loyalty programs and other traditional customer-facing systems and processes.

In this new era of Social engagement, do we need to employ similar methods and tools to understand relative value? Absolutely! If anything, measurement becomes far more important, although the methods through which such measurements are attained changes dramatically.

This is exactly why, despite the protestations of many, Influence Scoring systems and tools such as Klout and our own Inbox Influencer continue to rise in importance. As NetBase CMO Lisa Rosner recently blogged:

As marketers, we’re always measuring things. It used to be butts in seats, then clicks, now followers and re-tweets. In 2012, we will be measured and rewarded by metrics like Klout scores—both our personal and our company’s scores. Last I checked, my Klout score is higher than my age—whew! But that was not the case a few months ago. So as you drive followers to your various social media outlets, make sure you have all the necessary elements going: influence, comments, mentions, unique likers and yes, still re-tweeters, to keep that score growing. Your boss is watching and measuring.

It is indeed about measurement – and the social data that we need to measure to understand Influence, and react accordingly, is expanding massively and rapidly. We cannot manage what we cannot measure, so tools to measure – and make recommendations on – this data are in increasingly high demand. As I discussed during my presentation at the recent Social CRM event in NYC, IBM estimates that 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last 2 years alone.

Above the funnel – Social CRM NYC

As Cision USA President & COO Peter Granat wrote in his excellent post titled “Taming ‘big data’ for influencer marketing” yesterday in B2B Magazine, we are still in the very early innings:

Social media is only the first foray into big data in influencer marketing. The next advance will connect social profiles and content to customer profiles and transactions, accurately and in real time to bring message targeting to a new level of relevance and impact.

In other words, the coming challenge is to connect the results of the new science of Influence with the existing science of Customer Relationship Management – which is what the term ‘Social CRM’ should ultimately be about.

Like it or not (and many self-proclaimed ‘influencers’ don’t) Influence Measurement is here to stay – and grow in significance – in both marketers’ and executive toolkits. As Doc Searls suggests in the most recent Harvard Business Review, this shift will be wholesale, turning the practice of ‘marketing’ in a completely different direction:

This shift will be scary to many. It will strip the gears of marketing as we know it. But it will also improve marketing by fostering the design of new and better means of customer engagement—means that satisfy real demand directly, inform product development, and build true loyalty that goes both ways.

Tags: Inbox Influencer, Influence, Influencer Marketing, Klout, SCRM, Social CRM, Terametric
Posted in Big Data, Inbox Influencer, Influence, Social CRM, Social Influence Marketing, Strategy and Analysis | View Comments

The Top 5 Social Media ROI Predictions for 2012

Posted in Big Data, Social Media Marketing, Social Media Metrics, Social Media ROI, Wendy Troupe's Perspectives by Wendy Troupe on December 23rd, 2011

For the past few years, marketers have been working to define the metrics and methods to measure social media ROI but have they gotten any closer to establishing metrics that actually matter? Marketers now know that counting fans, followers, and influence is not the best way to measure their campaign investments in social media. Yet we find that these metrics are often the top benchmarks for performance. So is it true that in 2012, marketers still consider calculating return on investment to be the biggest challenge of using social media?

Research from Chief Marketer found that two in five marketers have little confidence in the effectiveness of their ability to measure social media campaigns.

So what is preventing marketers from establishing industry standards for measuring the effectiveness of social media and what will enable them to make 2012 the year of social media ROI? Here are the top 5 ways we think it can happen:

Apply business-level analysis to social media measurement and set benchmarks for pre/post comparisons to determine its true impact.
Segment social media metrics into 3 distinct buckets:
- Revenue/Business Development (sales, average order value, lead gen, etc.)
- Cost Savings (recruitment savings, online media mentions vs. PR agency fees, online customer support vs. call center fees, etc.)
- Qualitative Metrics (such as share of voice, brand awareness, influence and so on)
Choose the right technology, tools, metrics and collaboration to strengthen social media programs – it goes without saying that measurement and monitoring social media can be time consuming and wasteful without the right tools that can sift through this enormous set of data – both qualitatively and quantitatively.
Invest in dedicated resources – the big question for companies that have not yet fully created dedicated social media business units is deciding who in the company is supposed to be handling it, what are the new skill sets that are required, and how will they interface with other groups.
Focus marketing efforts on meaningful social engagement interactions instead of cheap impression strategies – move beyond campaigns that capture “likes” and “followers” into more meaningful interactions that support and build your community such as answering product questions and troubleshooting customer product issues which result in strong brand loyalty.

In the end, the competitive advantage goes to companies who quickly figure out how to tackle these issues in 2012 and the time is NOW to begin. We’re hopeful companies and brands not only achieve but surpass these predictions in social business and we look forward to working towards that same end in the New Year!

Posted in Big Data, Social Media Marketing, Social Media Metrics, Social Media ROI, Wendy Troupe's Perspectives | View Comments

Closed Loop Marketing: Leveraging Twitter Analytics in Real Time

Posted in Big Data, Social CRM, Social Media Marketing, Social Media Metrics, Twitter ROI, Wendy Troupe's Perspectives by Wendy Troupe on December 5th, 2011

In my last post about the opportunities that big data presents for marketers, I illustrated how external data – when collected and analyzed – can provide awareness, intent and conversions and when combined with customer relationship management systems, provides opportunity for customer support and engagement.

Connecting the dots between external and internal data presents a new opportunity for marketing to directly impact sales and customer support.

It’s also about closing the loop – or closed loop marketing. A closed loop marketing system allows marketers to determine which activities in one or more channels are the most efficient sources of new customers.

With closed loop marketing marketers can track leads from their initial contact through a first conversion all the way to becoming a customer. This allows you to see which channel activities are the most efficient and gives you actionable insight to make smart marketing investments.

How Does Closed Loop Marketing Work?

It begins with collecting and measuring activities in Twitter and other marketing and sales channels such as your website, blog, community and CRM system. Each activity is weighted according to its ability to drive conversion.

1. Measurement & Optimization

Comparing oubound (what you do in Twitter) vs. inbound (what happens as a result) metrics
Competitive benchmarking (compare your results to your top competitors)
Daily averages over 14 days (collect data on a daily basis and reset after 14 days)
Optimized over time (look for patterns over time and adjust the weights or relevance of individual metric values)

Once you’ve analyzed the data, its about choosing the most under performing metrics relative to your competitors and incorporating them into your outbound activities.

2. Efficient & Effective Outbound Activities

Who to follow (identify those active members of your Twitterverse to follow)
When to tweet (identify when the most active times are to tweet relative to trending topics of conversation)
What to tweet about (identify highly influential and trending topics of conversation to maximize the activity levels of your tweets)

Tracking that outbound activity with the results – or inbound activity – is critical to knowing whether the predictive capability of your initial analysis is accurate.

3. ROI Analysis

Soft conversions (conversions that generate engagement vs. actual revenue)
Customer support (actual customer interactions on Twitter)
Sales cycle & conversions (conversions that generate revenue or shorten the sales cycle)

Due to the real time nature of Twitter, this process is ongoing and data should be collected on a daily basis but analyzed on a weekly basis. What you do this week on Twitter might be different the next. When this is done in real time, the results yield highly targeted and efficient use of Twitter.

Posted in Big Data, Social CRM, Social Media Marketing, Social Media Metrics, Twitter ROI, Wendy Troupe's Perspectives | View Comments

How The Clymb Uses Top of the Funnel Marketing Metrics to Drive Twitter ROI

Posted in Big Data, Social CRM, Social Media Analytics, Social Media Marketing, Social Media Metrics, Twitter ROI by Wendy Troupe on November 22nd, 2011

The Clymb is a private flash sale site for Outdoor Gear and Apparel. Kevin Palmer is responsible for their online marketing. At the Clymb, Kevin measures membership growth, customer service questions, and the reach of their Twitter posts which directly impacts their outbound activities.

Kevin follows a methodology that assembles metrics in real time to captures “top of the funnel” Twitter activity to track their marketing activities through to where sales are created.

It’s easy to understand how valuable your existing customers are, and easy to think about how you want to spend time and money in promoting and building your brand in Twitter.

Like any ordinary marketing funnel – many prospects enter the funnel at the top but only a few continue down to the bottom. Those who make it to the bottom are your high value customers. In simplistic terms, all you have to do is attract many prospects in at the top – customers and therefore profits should come out the bottom.

However, there are two important things to note.

Many online businesses spend a lot of time and resources attracting people to follow them in Twitter, but not enough making sure that these people are converted into sales.
Businesses often neglect marketing to and supporting existing customers through Twitter. Marketing efforts should also be focused on moving people down the marketing funnel as well as into it at the top.

Twitter can become a channel that drives trust and engagement. Segmenting your measurement in real time into these four buckets can help you execute successful marketing campaigns using Twitter.

How The Clymb Measures & Monitors Twitter

Set benchmarks against their competitor activity and found that use of lists, follower influence, hashtags, authenticity, and which topics of conversation are trending which drove their targeted outbound Twitter activities.
Build their follower lists which include industry enthusiasts, brands they partner with, customers, and athletes.
Share content that people care about and try to leverage hashtags to track conversations.
Curate posts from their friends and partners at relevant peak activity time certain times.

How They Calculate the ROI and Close the Loop

Track actual membership referrals.
Measure customer engagement & support.
Calculate competitive growth and refine outbound activities.

This has been scaled with a limited staff because they are leveraging big data to become more efficient and effective.

What Are the Results of Their Closed Loop Measurements in Action?

Awareness: Their website has seen an over 300% growth in Twitter followers since the start of the year.
Intent: Twitter has a 3:1 share rate when it comes to members sharing product listings.
Conversions: Twitter has a 30% higher member invite rate than Facebook, their users are more likely to invite new members.
Customer Engagement: 78% of all customer service inquiries placed on Twitter that we have answered have led to a positive tweet about the brand.

“Concentrated content matters. It isn’t how much we post, but what and when.”
- Kevin Palmer, Senior Director of Online Marketing

Posted in Big Data, Social CRM, Social Media Analytics, Social Media Marketing, Social Media Metrics, Twitter ROI | View Comments

Leveraging Big Data: THE Major Theme at Defrag

Posted in Big Data, Social CRM, Social Media ROI, Strategy and Analysis, Wendy Troupe's Perspectives by Wendy Troupe on November 15th, 2011

Upon returning from the 5th annual Defrag conference in Denver, it became evident very quickly that the major theme at the conference was “big data”. Although the notion of big data has been around for some time in other industries, social media has created a whole new and exponentially larger deluge of data for businesses to leverage within the last couple of years.

To be exact:

IBM just completed a study and found that more than 90% of the data in the world today was created in the last two years.
Facebook allows users to share 30 billion pieces of content each month.
Twitter’s active user base generates 250 million tweets per day.
Combined, these sites create 17 terabytes of data every day.
In total, every day we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data.

What are the dimensions and challenges of big data? Roger Ehrenberg broke it down really well. Big data is:

Complex
Large
Unstructured
Real Time

Likewise, Jive’s David Gutelius described big data similarly using– the Four V’s analogy:

Velocity
Variety
Volume
Volatility

But let’s be clear – big data is in its infancy and growing at an exponentially high rate.

Analytics is More than Counting

This new data deluge promises to provide us the opportunity to turn information overload into an asset for better decision making by applying analytics. Even within analytics, it is more than just counting total volumes of activity – it is about mining intelligence from disparate data sources – looking for the patterns and relationships in the data itself.

Think of big data as the words of a story – by themselves they have limited meaning. When you add grammar and structure, you begin to link together these words and can develop many different meaning and insights from the collection of words. The science of big data is similar – data stored in information systems are the words and the emerging data analytics is the grammar which allows analysts and decision makers to derive meaning from data.

There are some challenges in doing it the old way in collecting these huge volumes of data and analyzing it. It can be inefficient and cost prohibitive and difficult to scale. People and resources are being wasted. It is estimated that employees spend up to two hours a day looking for the right information, such as analyzing tweet streams.

Collecting smaller subsets of data and analyzing it for patterns over time will provide better predictive capability that just storing and counting total volumes.

Your Customers Are Engaging in Real Time

And businesses are finding that they have to move quickly. Their customers are multiplying like rabbits online.

Did you know that socially engaged consumers spend more on brands than those people who don’t interact? That’s according to a new Bain & Company report, which studied social media and its role in marketing.

Apparently, the study found that people who talk to brands on networks like Twitter and Facebook spend 20 to 40 percent more money on their products and services compared to those who don’t. They also show a ‘deeper emotional commitment’ to companies who use social media – 33 per cent higher than the common measure for customer loyalty.

Due to the speed and access of information at their fingertips, consumers expect the same quick response if they talk to brands online. For example, if someone ‘tweets’ a brand, they expect an instant reply. If they don’t get this ‘real-time customer service’, they’ll feel ignored and your reputation could be at stake.

Looking at these fascinating facts and figures, it’s clear. Engagement adds real value these days, a crucial aspect of movement marketing. But how does engagement lead to more sales?

Big Data is About Connecting the Dots

With this extremely large and unstructured data set that consists of qualitative, quantitative and the social graph, there is a smaller very relevant subset of data that represent opportunities for sales and marketing to capitalize on. When this data set is combined and correlated with an organization’s internal data set, it becomes a lead-gen pipeline for and a more efficient and effective method of attracting, engaging and supporting customers – in real time.

External data when collected and analyzed can provide awareness, intent and conversions and when combined with customer relationship management systems, provide opportunity for customer support and engagement.

Connecting the dots between external and internal data presents a new opportunity for marketing to directly impact sales and customer support.

Posted in Big Data, Social CRM, Social Media ROI, Strategy and Analysis, Wendy Troupe's Perspectives | View Comments

Twitter Curation: How Can Your Tweets Generate Marketing ROI?

Posted in Big Data, Content Marketing, Optimizer for Twitter, Twitter Marketing, Twitter ROI, Wendy Troupe's Perspectives by Wendy Troupe on October 21st, 2011

Here at Terametric, we’ve developed a methodology that analyzes a marketer’s relevant Twitter activity and can help them to compose a “healthy” tweet. What makes a tweet “healthy”? Tweets that can reach the right audience, at the right time, with the right message can drive highest likelihood of the ultimate goal – conversions.

Conversion activity is defined in volume of one or more of the following activities:

Retweets
Link Sharing
Replies
@mentions
Follows

Ultimately, composing a healthy tweet is based on your ability to include the the following components that are currently trending high in the Twittersphere:

The most influential people (@handle).
The right conversations (#hashtags).
A shortened url for further engagement beyond Twitter.
The right retweeted keywords.
A positive call to action.

Optimizer for Twitter Real-Time Curation Logic

So how do you know what is currently trending and relevant? Twitter is real time and knowing how to pick up on the right components and the right time is critical.

Terametric’s curation methodology is based on a letter grading scale of F (for failure to convert) to A+ (most likely to convert). A tweet gets a C (average) grade when it includes the basic components of a tweet including a hashtag, a shortened url, an “@” mention, keywords that are relevant to your brand, product or industry, and a positive call to action. If any of those components are trending in the Twittersphere, the grade goes up from there.

The Bottom Line

Marketers should be informed in real time when they are using Twitter. The data should work for them so that they can monitor trending conversations and are enabled to act on them when they are happening.

For a free trial of Optimizer for Twitter, sign up today!

Posted in Big Data, Content Marketing, Optimizer for Twitter, Twitter Marketing, Twitter ROI, Wendy Troupe's Perspectives | View Comments

Building Twitter Influence 1 Week at a Time: Terametric Inbox Influencer now in public Beta

Posted in Big Data, Inbox Influencer, Influence, Twitter Marketing by Wendy Troupe on October 13th, 2011

Twitter’s growth rate has continued to rise with 14.4m users added per month and more than 165 million overall, and the number of tweets per day now in excess of 230m, up more than 100% from the beginning of the year. For marketers, finding your audience on Twitter is daunting because it requires relevancy which can come in the form of topics, influence and marketplace and/or competitive activity.

Terametric has begun to roll out our public beta version of a simple yet powerful new service to help address this problem called “Inbox Influencer”. The proprietary ‘mojo’ algorithms in this product are leveraged from Optimizer for Twitter and suggests people you don’t currently follow that you may find relevant and influential. The suggestions are based on a weeks worth of analysis of the people you follow, followers of your competitors, and relevant topics. Best of all, it’s free and you can sign up today and receive your first top influencer suggestions within 24 hours – delivered right to your inbox!

How are we different?

Our methodology sifts through thousands of tweets a day per account and deconstructs reams of relevant Twitter data looking for those who are actively engaging in Twitter including:

How often and consistently they tweet?
How effective they are in building an audience?
Do they tweet about topics that are relevant to your organization, your keywords and your competitors?

We build the most stringent of intelligent requirements into our selection methodology so that our recommendations are relevant, influential and effective in helping you to build the right audience in Twitter while filtering out spammers.