Posts Tagged ‘Social Intelligence Engine’

Social Intelligence is Picking Up Steam

Posted in Uncategorized by Matt Carter on June 16th, 2010
 

The concept of Social Intelligence seems to be gathering some steam lately.  We first discussed the concept of Social Intelligence in our 1/25/2010 blog post called, “What the @%# is a Social Intelligence Engine”.

In this posting, we published the chart below, which pairs a company’s social media development with the tool that is most relevant to their needs.

Social intelligence social media maturity

As a company’s understanding and social media needs mature, they require an increasingly more sophisticated means of integrating social media into their marketing channel measurement mix.

Social Intelligence isn’t measuring social media in terms of social media impact alone(share of voice, conversation index, etc.)  That’s what happens in Stages 2 (monitoring) and Stage 3(Listening).  When we speak of Social Intelligence, we mean using social media and its sea of relevant customer data as a way to better measure and optimize marketing channels and total marketing performance.  We gave the name “Social Intelligence Engine” to our own tool, which is designed to do just that.

On March 12, Forrester Analyst, Zach Hofer-Shall presented a report called “Defining Social Intelligence“.  Zach talked about “monitoring” as a passive or reactive practice and the development of social intelligence as a pathway to proactive marketing optimization.  In this report, Zach defined the concept of Social Intelligence much more succinctly than us:

“Social intelligence is defined as the management and analysis of customer data from social sources, used to activate and recalibrate marketing or business programs.”

Since March, the concept of Social Intelligence has slowly begun to take hold and companies are beginning to accept the methodology’s validity — using data from social media to analyze and quantify marketing performance and dial it in accordingly.  In fact, only yesterday, global ratings firm Neilsen announced a joint venture with research giant, Mckinsey to create NM Incite, a marketing consulting group powered by social intelligence.

These developments can only be good news for us here at Terametric.  We’ve come through our initial pilot engagements and have used the learning to further refine our Social Intelligence Engine.  Stay tuned as we’ll soon begin our limited beta.  If your organization is interested in being a part of that beta and getting ahead of the Social Intelligence curve, please sign up here.

6MTSCY68A8A5

Tags: , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | View Comments

Putting Social Media in its Place, Pt2: Social Intelligence KPIs

Posted in Strategy and Analysis by Matt Carter on March 14th, 2010
 

In Part 1 of this two-part series, we explored the limitations of channel measurement and how this often silo’d, measurement approach rarely reflects the customer reality:

“Many companies align their marketing departments according to channel teams . . . It’s easy to understand how this structure would make operational sense for a large organization. It makes for a very clear and concise organizational chart. Yet, customers are rarely funneled down these discreet and carefully delineated paths. The target’s path is often blurred and meandering, crossing several marketing channels before arriving at “customer-hood”. All acknowledge this reality, yet measurement structures rarely reflect it.“

A “measurement bridge”, between channels, is needed to create an accurate view of comprehensive marketing performance.

Social Media can become the measurement bridge between individual marketing channels. When leveraged properly, data from Social Media acts as an adhesive, binding individual channel performance into an accurate, holistic view.

With data carefully gathered from metrics and conversations in the social web and inbound performance metrics, Terametric calculates a series of Key Performance Indicators. These KPIs span the entire marketing channel mix and provide decision-makers with a comprehensive and detailed view of a company’s ability to attract, engage and retain customers. Collectively, we refer to these KPIs as Social Intelligence:

 

 

Social Intelligence is first calculated for each individual channel based on its inbound performance. Each individual channel’s Social Intelligence is then aggregated into a comprehensive brand Social Intelligence. In this part of the series, we’ll discuss selected KPIs in greater detail, explaining the valuable role they play in providing an accurate and holistic picture of marketing performance.

Engagement
A measure of your ability and willingness to engage with your audience. Ultimately, it is the measure of how much of a voice you have in the competitive marketplace, how much that voice resonates and how effectively that voice captures the interest of your community. Channel engagement is calculated from several data points, through multiple sources. An Engagement Score for the web channel is factored, in part from, an analysis of reviews, traffic sources, content consumption, etc.

Loyalty
Is calculated by measuring the average length and depth of an engaged customer relationship. Continuing with the web channel example, Loyalty is calculated, in part, by factoring depth of visit, length of visit, regency, repetition and average visitor volume for a period of time specified by the channel’s assigned priority.

Retention
As a holistic score, Retention denotes the frequency that you attract repeat engagements across multiple channels and how often a single customer is exposed to more than one channel. As a web channel measure, Retention is factored, in part, by bounce rate and visitor trending over a defined period of time. Much like Loyalty, the period of time is set by the channel’s pre-determined priority to the overall marketing effort.

Sentiment
A hot button topic for many trying to measure Social Media, SOCIALtality creates a multi-dimension Sentiment assessment. For both multi and single channel analysis, Sentiment is scored according to Over-arching reaction, Energy-level and demonstrated Trust. Given the margin of error for existing natural language processing (NLP), Sentiment Analysis and the complexity of assessment.

In the next part of our series, we’ll explore the other dimensions of Social Intelligence and share some of our proprietary Social Intelligence data visualizations. As always, if you have any questions, see any holes, object to or rally behind anything you’ve read, let us know in the comments section and we’ll address the with alacrity!

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Strategy and Analysis | View Comments

Putting Social Media in its Place, Pt 1: The Beleaguered CMO

Posted in Social Media ROI, Wendy Troupe's Perspectives by Matt Carter on March 11th, 2010
 

In two of our previous postings, Bridging the Social Media Silo and Are you Blindly Optimizing Your Marketing, we discussed some common themes that emerged during our Alpha Qualification work. Many companies align their marketing departments according to channel teams. One team has responsibility for the website, another is charged with SEO/SEM and yet another has responsibility for print and/or broadcast. In many organizations, a brand new team silo has been created to leverage social media. Each team is responsible for tracking and reporting on the performance of their designated area.

It’s easy to understand how this structure would make operational sense for a large organization. It makes for a very clear and concise organizational chart. Yet, customers are rarely funneled down these discreet and carefully delineated paths. The target’s path is often blurred and meandering, crossing several marketing channels before arriving at “customer-hood”. All acknowledge this reality, yet measurement structures rarely reflect it.

The often-beleaguered CMO is then left to make sense of a channel measurement structure that compares apples to oranges and bares little resemblance to the customer reality. How can marketing investments be effectively optimized with only a partial or misleading picture available? Is it any wonder that these under-appreciated, Captains of Marketing have an average corporate life expectancy of 22.9 months?

So, how does a company develop a clearer picture of marketing’s effect on the target? How can companies determine which channels perform and which lag as the target zig-zags across them? How can a company be certain that their marketing investment is optimized to turn targets into customers?

Social Media may hold the key.

In our recent posting, The World’s Largest Source of Target Data, we spoke of Social Media as an incredible collection of data points:

Social Media is an almost limitless source of data about the habits, lifestyles, opinions, relationships and behaviors of an incredibly diverse pool of people . . . More than 100 million people have swelled the ranks of social media visitors in just two short years. Today, the total pool of individuals stands at more than 300 million strong, roughly the equivalent of every man, woman and child in the United States.

With such a repository of data available and with the right tool, Social Media can become the measurement bridge between individual marketing channels. When leveraged properly, data from Social Media acts as an adhesive, binding individual channel performance into an accurate, holistic view.

Our methodology combines the detailed measurement and analysis of each individual marketing channel. . .

. . . with data carefully gathered from Social Media to inform a series of Key Performance Indicators. These KPIs span the entire marketing channel mix and provide decision-makers with a comprehensive and detailed view of a company’s ability to attract, engage and retain customers. Collectively, we refer to these KPIs as Social Intelligence:

In our next post, we’ll define these KPIs in detail and provide examples of their use and organizational value (dare we say ROI Calculation). In the meantime, if you have any questions, please put them in the comments section and we’ll respond as soon as we’re able.

Photo by PatrickSmithPhotography

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Social Media ROI, Wendy Troupe's Perspectives | View Comments

Bridging the Social Media Silo

Posted in Strategy and Analysis by Matt Carter on March 6th, 2010
 

 

In the last several weeks, the Terametric team has spoken with several potential, enterprise-level AlphaTesters. It’s an exciting time to be a part of an organization bringing an unprecedented level of measurement, analysis and ultimately, accountability to both Social Media and a company’s full, marketing channel mix. Each week, we’re discovered by a growing crowd of newly-intrigued individuals.

I’d love to believe that our awareness-building efforts are solely responsible for generating this momentum, yet I think it has more to do with internal changes in the organizations themselves. Companies are moving beyond Trial Phase of Social Media Maturity in growing numbers. They’ve become comfortable with entry-level monitoring and measurement and now seek an intelligence solution that can match the organization’s growing desire to leverage Social Media more strategically.

Yet, we find evidence of measurement silos in many of these organizations. We often begin our presentations with the following graphic, illustrating what our measurement and analysis methodology encompasses:

 

More often than not, this graphic is greeted with a small amount of hesitancy and trepidation. It seems that many organizations divide their communications channel responsibilities among several different groups. We find the biggest divide is often between the Website Team (those with responsibility for maintaining and optimizing the site, often including SEO and SEM) and the Social Media Team. The Web Team is often more closely associated with the IT Group and the Social Media Team seems to be closely aligned with Events or Outbound Marketing Teams.

As companies begin to approach Social Media more strategically, it is essential that they bridge the internal gaps between Teams and responsibility silos in order to create an environment conducive to true Marketing Optimization. Without an integrated, holistic picture of performance encompassing all channels, true optimization may elude even the most strategic organizations.

The first step is to identify a measurement solution that can measure and analyze each channel’s performance and then quantify the relationships between channel performance. A tool like ours can help a company fully understand and quantify how a focused Social Media effort can affect organic search and the receptivity of the audience to the latest email campaign. We aren’t the only tool out there, but I think we might be the most comprehensive. Many organizations rely on monitoring tools yet, there scope is often limited to the measurement of conversation threads, share of voice, etc. We’ve found that reliance on these tools can sometimes strengthen rather than break down the walls that separate marketing teams.

Step two should be the creation of a cross-functional marketing group. Perhaps by taking the leader of each individual team, an organization could create a marketing “steering committee” whose members collectively share the responsibility for marketing’s big picture and report directly to the CMO. This group would share the CMO’s responsibility for the big picture and could be tasked with creating the type of cross-channel, long-term initiatives that can be difficult to create in a more delineated marketing structure.

How have your organizations bridged the marketing silos?

Image by Luke Olsen

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Strategy and Analysis | View Comments

Are You Blindly Optimizing Your Marketing?

Posted in Social Media ROI by Matt Carter on February 15th, 2010
 

You can’t measure what you can’t see. If your tools are limited to measuring volume of mention, share of conversation, +/- sentiment, degree of influence, etc there may be a lot you’re not seeing. In fact, if your current analytics tools aren’t measuring the effect that your social media initiatives have on other communications channels, then you may be attempting marketing optimization while blindfolded.

Many of today’s leading social media monitoring and analysis tools are fantastic at providing a cornucopia of social media metrics coupled with exciting data visualizations. They slice and dice social media issue trends, the strength of your brand’s influencers and the power of your brand’s voice across social networks. Some even quantify the reception your multi-channel messaging efforts receive in the social media space.

Yet, how valuable is that insight in relation to your total, multi-channel marketing efforts? Aren’t those metrics really just a single step up in complexity and sophistication from tracking the number of friends, fans and followers?

Brian Solis, in his Social Marketing in Twenty Ten, posts states:

“Measuring sentiment analysis, would-be referrals, and increases in share of voice are entry-level techniques that do not necessarily capture the potential of socialized media channels.”

As organizations begin to harness the true power of social media and strategically incorporate it into the wider marketing plan, it becomes increasingly important to understand and quantify its effects on existing channels and vice versa. Only through understanding the performance relationships between all channels can today’s marketer truly optimize.

Terametric’s measurement and scoring methodology studies the performance of each channel at a molecular level, breaking it down and analyzing its inbound and outbound attributes. As initiatives are deployed in one channel, it begins to affect the performance of inbound and outbound attributes (measured through multiple data points) in other channels. The scores of those other channels automatically adjust in response to their own performance fluctuations, giving marketers an accurate gauge of channel performance correlation.

A note on our scoring methodology from our What the #$%&@ is a Social Intelligence Engine posting:

Many scores can be absolutely meaningless when taken in isolation. Who’s to say that a score of 46 is better than a grade of E? The true value of our social intelligence engine’s scoring methodology is derived from studying the delta or degree of change over time and having sufficient data to correlate that change to specific events, initiatives, campaigns or efforts. True score validity comes from studying and scoring a company and its competitive set to establish a benchmark and then re-scoring periodically to reveal performance fluctuations.

This cursory glance at Terametric’s methodology may create more questions than answers. If so, let us know where you’d like more clarification. We’ll either reach out to you individually or if enough people respond with similar questions, we’ll develop a follow-up posting to address them.

Photo from Molly Orangette

Related Posts with Thumbnails

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in Social Media ROI | View Comments