For the first time, the brands did more public campaigns to gear up to the Super Bowl than any time before. Whether it was in form of contests to make audience vote for the best of the commercials or post teasers online to what to expect this year at Super Bowl. For example Chevy ran a Super Bowl ad content. The 40 finalist ad spots were viewed on YouTube more than 35 million times and people voted and discussed them for a month. Doritos on the other hand asked people to make ads and submit in their contest. The prize being the winning entry getting airtime during the bowl. Volkswagen building up on the last year’s Darth Vader success dropped a teaser of their this year’s ad titled the Bark Side. It got about 10 million views before the game day.

The entire phenomenon of Super Bowl advertising is taken to another level this year and in many ways, the $3.5 million that advertisers shelled out for 30 seconds had much more impact this year than ever before. Social media enabled the 30 second spot to be a month-long advertising campaign.

But then there was Chrysler’s Halftime in America. No one saw it before, no one heard about it. So when the voice of Clint Eastwood came at the halftime mark, people paid attention to the ad like the good old times. The social media impact here: the official copy of the ad posted by Chrysler was watched more than 10 million times on YouTube within a week of its airing during the Super Bowl!

First one is who influences you as an individual? When you are making a purchasing decision, deciding who to vote for or choosing a movie to watch you don’t necessary look out for what the top followed people on social networks are suggesting. More often you look for advice from your circle of friends whom you trust to make the right suggestion or whom you believe have the same taste and interests as you do. These are the people who influence you more in making a decision than anyone else.

Second point to note is what’s the domain? Not everyone is credible enough to  have influence in every domain. For example, if you are a fashion icon, you will have significant influence when it comes to fashion space. Your fans and followers will give value to what you got to say when it comes to fashion trends. But just having a million followers doesn’t make you influential in the topics you have no expertise or credibility. In fact in many cases, attempt to make influence in the areas you have no expertise makes you lose value in your area as well.

Having lots of followers maybe a status symbol in some ways. It does mean that there are people who are interested in listening to what you have to say. But it is a bit over-rated when it comes to measuring the influence. It matters more if you have a few followers who value your word and trust you in your area of expertise.

The essence of defining demographic profile is breaking the consumers into segments. But more often than not, it is found that consumer taste or preferences span across demographic segments. People of different age groups have similar interests. People like to watch certain television shows irrespective of their gender or social class. They like to use same products independent of which segments they are bracketed in through demographic profiling.

Look it from the opposite angle. Movie studios aspire their movies to appeal to all audience. Political candidates want their base to consist of everyone from young professionals to baby boomers. Same is true for many (though not all) television networks and consumer products. In very general terms, businesses want their appeal to span across a specific demographic segment.

We at MavenMagnet believe demographic profiling all by itself leaves several gaps in understanding consumers. In order to attract consumers beyond a specific demographic segment, you need to identify the commonalities between the consumers across segments. These commonalities are defined using psychographic traits  of the consumers. We do that by focusing on factors like their activities, opinions, beliefs and preferences. And what better place to find this information than social media where people express themselves, share their thoughts and engage in the community around them. In a nutshell, we focus on the behavioral elements that help us sketch a consumer profile in our market research.

Many businesses fear losing focus or diluting the appeal to their core consumer base while reaching out to new segments. Our approach to consumer profiling can help you fend that from happening. The idea is to add perspective to the demographic profile of your target group using psychographic traits of your consumers. This will help you add the capabilities of expanding your reach and appeal beyond your primary target group without alienating your core consumer base.

Whether it is the promotion of Lady Gaga’s new album, Arthur Christmas the movie, or the HTC tablet, the campaign around shuttle S stands out and grabs your attention. The campaign is designed to encompass the tunnel between the Grand Central entrance and the train along with wrapping the entire train inside out with the theme of the campaign.

In today’s world, this campaign stands out from the rest due to a couple of reasons. First is the campaign placement. Take the fast pace of NYC and the power of smartphone in every hand. The campaign mitigates both these distractions. If you are going from Grand Central to Times Square or vice versa, the five minutes that you spend in this transit, any where you look the themed advertisements are there. So no matter in what kind of rush you are, you cannot escape the campaign all around you. Another genius of the campaign is that it is in the subway and being in the subway, the smartphone signal is not there. Though you can still play games and dig in the archive of your emails, the probability of you looking away from your phone is much higher than anywhere else. Plus add to it the duration of the ride being too short for you to pay real attention to anything else, be it your smartphone or the kindle.

Second stand out feature of this campaign is the theme. It’s not just banners all around you. These campaigns are designed with a very thorough theme and flow to grab attention and make you look around at other nuggets of the campaign if you happen to look at a part of it.

This combination of great design and thoughtful placement gives the campaign relatively undivided attention of the consumer for at least a few minutes every day for 21 days. Now that’s a campaign done right!

First is market research. A big part of traditional market research is polls and surveys. Cold calls are made to people to ask questions. With more and more people carrying cellphones, it is harder for pollsters to get the complete attention of the survey taker. A person on the go is less inclined to waste time and money (cellphone minutes) speaking to a pollsters. You may argue that there are still a large number of landline phone connections out there to be sufficient for pollsters to meet their targets and form a decent sample. That may be true today, but it comes with a big caveat. Numbers show that a growing number of households with all members carrying a cellphone are opting out of getting a landline. This brings the sample down to households with a stay at home member who still values a landline. Add to it the bulk of people putting their (cell)phone numbers on the no call list and you get the complete picture. In short, traditional market research has had a big negative impact due to the advent of cellphones.

Second area I want to talk about here is social media. Cellphone has raised the amount of activities on social media dramatically. With a growing number of people carrying a cellphone with data connection, people are constantly connected to their favorite social network. They post their views, share recommendations and post pictures on social networks. This is live as it happens and is off the cuff without premeditated state of mind. You may argue that it is mostly coming from the younger generation, but the fact being average age of a person active on social media touching 40, that doesn’t seem to be the case. In other words, social media is having a big positive impact due to the growing use of cellphones.

Now bring these two areas together and you get what MavenMagnet is trying to leverage. We use social media as a base for our market research. We do not believe that traditional market research is to go anywhere anytime soon, but the kind of insights we can drive off social media can provide a more truthful and real perspective on concerned issues. These insights are derived without bothering the people by calling them or asking them questions, making cellphones a big asset for MavenMagnet market research.

Coca-Cola connection with the Santa Claus goes back about 80 odd years. It was in 1931 when Coca-Cola first released the campaigns with the man in red suit drinking the cola.  Over the years, Santa become more famous and got closer to Christmas.

It’s a known fact that the obsession Indians have with cricket is unmatched in the world. Cricket is religion in India and the top cricketer is nothing short of God. If you want to send a message to more than a billion people, the best language used is that of cricket. Pepsi adopted this language and the connection they drew was to the uniform of the cricket team. Pepsi became the official cola sponsor of the team and launched a campaign called “Men in Blue”. Over the years, Men is Blue became the alternate name for the Indian cricket team.

In more recent years, similar happened with the K’naan’s hit Wavin’ Flag. Coca-Cola picked the song to be the promotional anthem for 2010 FIFA World Cup. The song became incredibly famous and eventually became promotional anthem of every team sport out there.

Whether it’s a jolly old fellow becoming the mascot to bring joy and happiness to kids around the world or a fancy name becoming permanently attached to a sports team or a promotional anthem becoming a celebration song for every team sport, if you look back it all became a grand thing partly because an advertising campaign took charge.

Interestingly, none of these were created by the advertising campaign. Santa Claus was a character created much before Coca-Cola created its own version. But eventually Coca-Cola version took over. Indian cricket team wore a blue uniform for the shorter format of the game ever since colored uniform came to the game. But they started to be popularly known as Men in Blue after Pepsi ran the infamous campaign.  Wavin’ flag song was a Canadian hit much before Coca-Cola picked it for the FIFA world cup. But it became a global phenomenon after the Coca-Cola’s advertising campaign.

All these appear so awesome in retrospect but were definitely not planned to become social phenomenon. Advertising brains planned an outstanding campaign. Consumers adopted it and gave it a much bigger purpose than just an advertisement for the brand and the advertisers went along. The beauty is, after a while the audience emotional attachment with the brand is reversed. A seven-year old sees Santa drinking coke and draws a connection with coke. An Indian  cricket fan sees their favorite cricket team wearing Pepsi blue (even though Pepsi changed its color to match the cricket team’s) and gets attracted towards the cola. Talk about ROI, it’s just immeasurable. It’s working for years and it will be reaped by generations to come.

With the advent of social media and with more people spending time on social networks, brand pages are becoming synonymous with presence of companies  in social media. Facebook, Google Plus and Twitter provide companies with a platform and make it very easy to create and maintain their brand pages. Just like websites and blog in case of Internet, brand pages have become an anchor for brands in social media.

I wonder what is the role of a brand page when it comes to a company’s presence in social media. Does having a cool brand page and good analytical system behind it sufficient for a brand to leverage the social media? We draw parallels between brand pages and websites & blogs to put things into perspective. If we do an Internet search for a company, there will be thousands of results associated with it. You do get the website of the company and link to its blog but along with it there are a slew of other results that provide a whole lot of information about the company. The reason being people mention their thoughts on a company at different news avenues, trade publications, forums and so on. A company’s website is not the singular place for information on Internet, though one thing that is true is that it is the authoritative source of information on Internet.

Same is the case in social media. In fact in social media, this thing reaches new levels because everyone has their own space to share thoughts comments and views. What an individual is doing on social media is knowingly or unknowingly building his or her social capital. You talk more with people you know. You make recommendations and promote a cause  so that it reaches people whom you have an impact on. Brand pages are definitely a great place for companies to have as a source of information and base for interaction on social media, but it is not enough for them to leverage social media.

To a large extent, brand pages is an over-hyped phenomenon in social world. I am not saying that you should not have brand pages. I believe they are a must have on social networks. But an average social media user likes (or follow or adds – use the term for your favorite network) more than two pages every month. They don’t interact on tens of brand pages on a regular basis. In order to leverage social media optimally, you got to learn and understand what people are talking about you. What are they liking, what are they hating and why is there a certain perception about you out there. We focus on providing you true insights which come from conversations beyond your brand pages. You can use these insights to strategize how you want to appear in front of your consumers, how you want to interact and how you want to adapt in social media and beyond.

Broadly speaking, a person with large number of followers on Twitter, subscribers on Facebook, and similar things in other networks is considered to be influential in social media. That’s generally true when you are talking about very general things, things with universal appeal and mass interest, or in cases when you look at social media as a black-box. But there are two important points that we consider while calculating social influence.

First is contextual experts. The growth of social media networks has changed how we get news and information, how we voice our opinion and how we interact with each other. Not everyone is interested in everything. If you look closely at social world, there are clusters out there, just like in the “real” world out there. People are experts of a specific topic. They are interviewed on specific subjects. If you are trying to find out about protests in certain part of the world, you listen to different people, if you are trying to find out about the next best thing in space aviation, you pay attention to others and if you are interested in a highly anticipated movie, you listen to yet another set of experts. That’s where context come in picture. When we look at social media influence index, we make sure to take contextual experts into account because without context, it is just not possible to gauge the impact levels and reach to the right insights.

Second thing is relevant mavens. How relevant individuals are in their own social circles on a certain topics? In other words, in what area are you the maven for your friends. In most general communications on social networks, you listen to your friends or the people you know. When you write something about a particular topic, there is a lot of interest from your friends on it. Your social circle pays attention to it because they consider you as someone important and relevant to discuss that topic. On certain topics people ask for your opinion. So when we calculate social index, we do it for a particular area of research  and take into account mavens in these individual circles to add weight to their opinion.

There is a level of overlap in the first and second case, but there is a considerable difference as well. The difference is that of the personal touch. In the case of contextual experts, the communication is happening on a broader platform. People are expressing themselves or listening to others without any personal connection. It’s more similar to media of mass communication with a touch of interactivity. In the case of mavens, the communication is happening in small groups. It’s where you have personal affinity to the people you are communicating with and in more cases, that is more influential than anything else. It’s where you see the real impact of the social world.

In a nutshell, what we are doing is converting that black-box based influence calculator into a sophisticated process to account for context and relevance while calculating the influence of every post in the social world. That’s the real social influence that plays a critical role in trending opinions, creating perceptions and extracting real insights.

When we use social media for market research, one of the great luxuries and benefits is the availability of large amount of data to tap into to draw insights. But on the flip side, it also brings with itself complexity of dealing with large amount of data. Talking about sampling, couple of important things are the sample size and the recruitment process to form the sample.

The sample size for drawing insights in social media is usually much larger as compared to what traditional market research uses for the same purpose. But what is the right size? Is it a few thousands? Tens of thousands? More? This is a very interesting question, but before answering this, we should touch a bit on the recruitment process.

While traditional market research focuses more on the people participating in the research, we focus more on the information people are sharing. We use this information to find out what are their viewpoints and opinions. We also consider the people behind the opinions to account for the impact they are creating, but that is done in context to the conversation they are having. This way we make sure that the sample we have gathered is completely random, as it should be in a good market research study.

We do not define the size of sample in our study but let the study results define it. We keep collecting the data and keep analyzing it till patterns start to emerge and clusters start to appear. After doing this for considerable amount of data, the patterns get solidified, themes become clear and insights are apparent. This process of getting to insights from data is just beautiful and the insights are credible as well as actionable to help you make great business decisions.

But just like chaos theory in mathematics, this social media chaos when deciphered using technology and looked upon by expert eyes has to do with there being great order in what looks like total randomness. And when you look closely enough at this randomness, patterns start to emerge which are nothing but absolutely beautiful.

Take for example a Presidential debate. People watch it on their televisions and use social media to express their opinions. Immense volume, contradicting opinions and complete chaos. But by using thematic analysis to extract the core themes out of the noise, we can find patterns in people’s opinions and their support towards a candidate. We can use predictive modeling to figure out what the candidate should speak or what she should not by analyzing the trends and sentiments in the conversations happening on social media.

The same technology and techniques can be applied in social media to find anything from how to spend millions on an advertising campaign to learning how a deadly disease is spreading in a country, from inferring the impact of a brand integration in a television show to understanding how a civic revolt took an entire nation to streets.

The beauty of information extracted from the chaotic social media is unparalleled to any other way of doing market research. The reason being it gives an opportunity to everyone, big and small, introverts and extroverts, book-smarts and street-smarts to express their views and make their voices heard. The data is vast and the power is immense. The debate is continuous and the reach is unmatched. All you need is the right technology and the right techniques to make sense of it and strategize your next move.

P.S. Try us at MavenMagnet to show you the beauty we are talking about!

The ease of information sharing has led to a large amount of data in the social world. This availability of data gives us a great opportunity to extract rich information out of it and put it to use. With cutting-edge technology and modern techniques we can slice-and-dice this data to make sense out of it. We can spot the patterns, adopt the best practices and avoid the mistakes we made the last time around.

Social media tracking plays a pivotal role in making sense of all that is happening in the social media 24/7. Consumer goods companies want to know what people are talking about their brands, media firms want to know how people are engaging with their movies, shows and characters, healthcare companies want to know how people are responding to the new drug they just put out on the shelves and governments wants to know what their citizens are expecting from them. This brings us to the real question we look into every time we talk to a client about social media tracking: can you take a breather while we make it rich or do you want it real-time?

A lot of it depends in what business you are in. If you are in business of customer service or public relations management, real-time is what you want. You want to make sure that if a customer is asking how to fix something, you get back to her as soon as possible. If there’s a customer complain about your product or service, you got to address it before it becomes a PR disaster. Of course you should periodically go through all the complaints and service requests and get an in-depth analysis to see the pattern that emerges so that you can address the core issues to avoid repetition of the same things over and over again.

In most other cases, what you want is a tracking report where the buzz is  accompanied with rich analysis to make sense of it. Social media brings with itself a tide of data overflow. We see it as a rich source of information that is extracted by mining this data using great software and techniques. It’s cool to see streams and streams of posts coming in while your show is airing on television or when you launch a new campaign or while you give the state of your union. But its just data. What is really awesome is the insights you can extract out of it. How do you go about doing it? Well wait for a little while, let the software and experts work on this data to convert it into information and then get insight into what it is all about, understand what’s working and what’s not, get the key takeaways and make things happen.

Note: Reach out to us at MavenMagnet to learn about some of the innovative work we are doing in this space!

What was United Breaks Guitars? It was basically a creative person lodging a complaint about a bad experience with the service. But what areas has it affected? Everything ranging from public relations and corporate communications to branding and customer service. This is all courtesy of social media.

The amplification of the impact of United Breaks Guitars was instantaneous and widespread because of the creative and talented complainer Dave Carroll. But social media has the power to take any normal complaint or customer outburst and turn it into wildfire, sometimes slowly and other times rapidly. The reason being the complaint here is not lodged privately to the company. It is public, where a customer’s network of friends and family, other customers who have had similar experiences and general people can join in the conversation, add their own 2 cents as well as keep the incident in mind while making their next buying decision.

What is important for companies is to prioritize the complaints and  make sure every customer complaint on social media is addressed proactively. The volume on social media is immense. With intelligent data mining techniques, companies can learn about the priority of customer conversation and make sure that the most pressing issues are addressed immediately and eventually they reach to every issue before it becomes another case study like United Breaks Guitars.

Here I would like to talk about how we can use social media to develop better advertisements. One of the best utilities of social media can be in designing and developing advertisements for any media varying from traditional media like television and print to new media like mobile and web. People spend hours on social media talking about everything from what they like and what they don’t, what characters and themes they are attracted towards, what activities they spend most time on and what are their top interests. People brag about the brands they like, critic on experiences they have with products, and talk about the advertisements that caught their attention while watching prime-time television or walking down the street. This makes social media a great repository of information to act as a canvas to design advertisements, find the right placements for them and learn how people are responding to them.

The idea is to gather social insights from social media and use these insights to develop advertisements. Advertisers can learn from social media what are the best themes to gain attention of their target audience. They can understand what are the best placement opportunities for their advertisements by learning which television shows their target audience are engaging with and which magazines they are reading. Social media is a great repository of information that adds a whole lot of richness to the market research that needs to be done in order to develop targeted advertisements. The creativity of advertisements is as important, if not more, as ever due to the decreasing attention span of the consumers, but with the help of market research powered by social media, advertisers can direct the creativity to focus on the right themes, place these awesome advertisements at the right places and learn from them to develop better ones next time around.

Note: Reach out to us at MavenMagnet to learn about some of the innovative work we are doing in this space!

It is really important to capture emotions in market research. In traditional market research, the research is primarily conducted using surveys and focus groups. It is really hard to capture emotions of consumers using questionnaires and surveys. The only possible way is to have open-ended questions where people might be able to express some emotions, but due to no instant interaction there, the level of expression is limited. I would argue that it is much more possible to do so in focus groups where people are in a room and are asked questions by a moderator followed by discussions. The only possible glitch in a focus group based market research is to capture the true emotions. When a person is sitting in a focus group, it is often the case that they have a set mindset of talking to a company’s representative about a product. They are conscious about what they are talking about and how the company and others in the room will perceive them based on their answers.

Now consider the case of social media based market research. In social media conversations, people use different platforms like blogs, Twitter, Facebook, forums and other networks to express themselves. They put forth their thoughts and recommendations which more often have emotions attached with them. When doing market research using social media as a data repository, we capture these emotions to understand the perception of consumers with respect to a product. Emotions are amplifiers in social media based market research. They stir the pot of conversations. They polarize the flow of discussions.

The emotions captured in market research done on social media are more truthful. The consumers are talking amongst themselves. We are not asking them questions. They express themselves how they experience something. By capturing these conversations and understanding and analyzing them and emotions attached with them, we can provide true insights on a product.

What is essential for a show to become a watercooler show on social media? Apart from great show creating a captive audience, it needs a few key influencers to stir the pot on social media, to talk about the show, love it when something great happens, hate it when the things are not as they would like it to be, but irrespective of anything happening just keep participating in conversations about it.

Millions of people spending hours online on social networks and talking about these shows also leads to an interesting side effect. It creates a rich source of data to find insights about these shows. By intelligent mining and analysis of these conversations, marketers can find what key themes and characters are sticking with the audience to develop promos and advertisements for the shows, advertisers can find what demographic and psychographic segments are associating themselves with the shows to better target their products, and producers can get a sense of what is working and what is not working in their shows. Social media sets new standards for audience analysis and measurement for the shows which are much more realistic and practical as compared to traditional methods of measurement.

The evolution of social media has impacted a lot of industries. In-home entertainment industry is one of them. Every television channel wants its show to be the watercooler show with captive customers and eager advertisers. In today’s connected world, that “watercooler” is replaced by something that is much bigger, scalable and measurable.  Social media is the new watercooler!