Social Monitoring for More Effective Media Planning

Originally published on The New Group blog on 10.1.11

Given the current and growing trends in business and consumer usage of social media, it's quite clear that media planners need to incorporate not only social properties into their mix but also social monitoring insights in order to build the most targeted, cost-efficient and results-driving media plans.

This means taking a comprehensive view with respect to how we as people interact with brand-produced, earned and consumer-generated media, and using these insights to architect the most relevant touch points for consumer and business customer interactions with brands: at the right time, within the right context, at the right place.

Using social monitoring is an important topic that we as marketing strategists continue to learn more about and refine our perspective on. I'm happy to have found a great presentation from the smart folks over at Forrester Research and Networked Insights that digs deeper into this topical area.

Since I'm a concept guy, I thought I'd share a few of the most interesting concepts presented in this presentation. Here they are:

* Incorporating social conversation catalysts into creative
* Starting with digital first, then editing for TV
* Next layer filters
* Directional indicators
* Contextual discovery
* Spending the "minimal effective amount"
* Making your TV media buys work harder with social
* Social data as a leading indicator to project audience growth
* Dynamic segmentation
* Real-timing sensing
* Using social data sequencing
* Social lift scores

I've long held the belief that you need to go beyond psychographic and demographic data and tap into an understanding of influence to make your media dollars work harder. This presentation really helps take that concept and add some further detail around how and why.

How to Infuse Media Planning with Social Data - Networked Insights & Forrester from Networked Insights on Vimeo.

Bottom line, great presentation, excellent ideas that really add value to where media planning is and needs to be going, thanks again to Forrester and Networked Insights. If you've got 45 minutes to spare, grab a coffee and check it out.

Social Media Monitoring—Choosing the Right Tool

Originally published on The New Group blog on 10.1.11

If you're a marketing strategy professional you know the importance of customer insights. Additionally, you know that you must incorporate the behavioral and conversational insights from the way business people and consumers are using social media today. With this an important question rapidly becomes: what's the best social media monitoring tool for my brand or business unit?

Well, it depends. Do you need to conduct historical analysis—and if so, over what time frame? Or do you need a tool that excels at real-time monitoring—if so, what social channels are most critical for your social media programs? Are you trying to identify and track your interactions with online influencers—and if so, do you need to coordinate the outreach efforts of multiple people or departments in your organization? Is closed-loop tracking of your outreach efforts a requirement or just a nice to have? These are not all, but certainly some, of the important questions you'll want to consider as you evaluate what the best-fit social media monitoring tool will be for your brand or business unit.

Over the past five plus years we've seen a plethora of social media monitoring tools enter the market. At The New Group we were early adopters and have used a number of tools including Social Radar, Radian6, Nielsen Buzzmetrics, Buzz Logic (before it turned into a social advertising network), Scout Labs (before it was purchased by Lithium), Alterian SM2 and Sysomos. We've conducted our own research into more than 30 tools and generally take a deep look at the social media monitoring tool market about twice a year.

Currently our tool of choice is Sysomos. Far and away, our favorite feature is speed, and the user interface is pretty friendly too. Speed is crucial to our social media listening workflow. Social media isn't slowing down anytime soon, so tools that cannot return real-time results are quickly becoming obsolete. However, depending on your particular situation, a different tool might better serve your needs. There really is no perfect one-size-fits-all social media monitoring tool on the market today. If you start with that mindset then you'll be a happier camper with the tool you end up selecting in the end.

Behavioral Advertising Units Informing the Consumer

Originally published on The New Group blog on 7.2.10

Would you like to learn more about why you are seeing this ad?

Behaviorally targeted online advertising has been under increasing scrutiny lately; here's a good example of enabling consumers to be more informed about what they're seeing, and to make a choice. You're still going to see advertising online, but you may now be getting just a little more choice about what.

Mobile Content Engagement and Usage Trends

Originally published on The New Group blog on 6.17.10

I know how much I use my iPhone and how often I check my surf forecast and weather apps, but some recent stats published in the MediaPost Mobile Insider newsletter are worth considering for a moment.

"the iPhone version of GQ magazine is seeing almost the same levels of monthly engagement (65-70 minutes) as the print magazine (80 minutes). Compare those numbers to GQ.com, which gets a measly 10 minutes a month."

If these early trends reported by publishers continue in the direction of heavy mobile engagement, the bigger question really becomes about the role of a "traditional" website meant for viewing via a laptop or desktop monitor. While I don't believe these form factors are going away anytime soon, one interesting question for me is what will mobile innovation look like over the next few years?

There's more stats in the full article if you're curious about this topic: Mobile: What the Web Should Have Been?

Mining Social Relationship Data for Serving Your Online Ads

Originally published on The New Group blog on 5.26.10

Should you or should you not mine the deep social connections between your customers and their friends as a source for finding new customers? This appears to be the next wave of socially-targeted advertising that is happening on the web, and based on a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, with impressive results.

There’s a handful of new measurement technologies in the market that are enabling this type of contextual, socially-targeted advertising. Through sophisticated data mining and relationship mapping, leveraging people’s social graph of connections, companies are now able to target messages and offers to the peers of their customers. Pretty cool I think, but I’m sure there’s others who will be paranoid about this stuff.

With all the scrutiny of behavioral targeting going on these days, this will likely be another interesting space to watch. It sounds promising, and I look forward to testing it out. While data-mapping connections between people seems to be a powerful way to target your ads; will it survive legislation that regulates it? I’m not sure yet.  For the moment though, here are a few of the companies who are making it happen:

Meteor Solutions
33 Across
Media6degrees
Lotame

Measuring Twitter to Understand Personas

Originally published on The New Group blog on 12.7.09

Do you know the psychological profile that your trail of tweets tells about you? TweetPsych just may be able to tell you. Another new entrant into the ever expanding world of Twitter measurement tools,TweetPsych is uniquley different in that it seeks to provide a psychological profile of a person through deep linguistic analysis of their tweets. I'm always looking for tools that can provide insight into people's mindset and provide data that helps to build a more accurate persona, TweetPsych is a facinating discovery. It will be interesting to see how it evolves over time.
Here's what I just learned about myself (although it would help if I had more tweets for the tool to analyze!)

Furthermore tools like TweetPsych hold great promise for helping us (as marketers) better understand the people we want to interact with through Twitter, thus providing insight to fuel content and related marketing strategy decisions. Very cool stuff.

Thanks to Avinash for blogging about this and other new Twitter measurement tools recently.

Real-time revenue optimization, metrics for multi-channel retailing

Originally published on The New Group blog on 11.23.09

I was recently blown away at seeing the sophisticated measurement and real-time optimization systems of a large multi-channel retailer and their ability to not only measure, but influence in real-time the metric of revenue per minute. It was almost like watching a highly active trader on the stock exchange make minute-by-minute decisions on buying or selling stock. Very cool stuff.

While not every business has the integrated measurement systems, high transaction volume and purchase activity required to use revenue per minute as a key metric, the ability to define, track against and measure KPI’s is something that every business should have in place.

Back to my story though, what was even more impressive about interacting with this retailer was that in speaking with employees throughout the company it was clear that this KPI of revenue per minute was fully ingrained. When new ideas were discussed, new marketing programs or advertising tactics, the conversation usually got back to evaluating those ideas against their ability to impact this KPI.

This is another really important point…while it’s great to have KPI’s, if they aren’t communicated broadly and referenced in decision making around the rationale for your marketing investments, then you’re simply not getting the full value and power out of defining your KPI’s.

So what are your KPI’s and how do you communicate them throughout your organization?