Social Influence: importance of experts and mavens

Posted on October 23, 2011 | Leave a comment

Power and fame are two irresistible attractions for most humans. It’s unusual to have a community without powerful voices or a gathering without organizers. The same is true in the online world webbed together by social networks. The concepts like followers, subscribers and friends has led people to look up to and aspire to be powerful voices and leaders in the social world. This in turn has led to defining the influence level of individuals in the social world.

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.

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Posted in Marketing, Technology

Innovative approach towards market research sampling

Posted on September 29, 2011 | Leave a comment

Historically great effort is put in getting the right sample for market research. A few thousand set-top boxes define the rating of every television show, an exit poll of 1000 voters define who’s going to win a general election and four groups of 15 people define the positioning statement of your favorite products. When millions of people view television, vote in an election and use a particular product, the onus on these select few to collectively make a definitive statement to the general public is gigantic. And that in turn defines the importance of sampling in market research.

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.

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Posted in Business, Technology

Chaos in Social Media

Posted on September 26, 2011 | 1 Comment

Social media as a whole looks like total chaos. 200 million tweets flying around every day (stats as of September 2011), a billion or so Facebook posts every day and more than a trillion YouTube videos. If you think 200 emails in your inbox Monday morning is chaotic, try to comprehend this. It’s like every common person out there with a microphone allowed to speak what he or she wants to speak. In other words, chaos at its absolute best!

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!

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Posted in Business, Technology

Social Media Tracking: Real-time vs. Richness

Posted on August 30, 2011 | Leave a comment

Real-time information sharing has become a part of our lives today. With the advent and spread of social media, real-time communication and information sharing has reached a new level. Social networks have wired us to share our opinions, thoughts and experiences instantaneously. We have the power to get the information in real-time as it happens and to express our thoughts in real-time as and when we want.

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!

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Posted in Technology

Social Media and Lodging a Complaint

Posted on August 15, 2011 | 1 Comment

One of the best examples of how social media can turn a small incident into a monstrous thing is United Breaks Guitars by Dave Carroll. Just to set the premise, Dave Carroll, a musician, was flying from Halifax, Canada to Omaha, Nebraska via Chicago on United Airlines flights. He checked in his guitar and when he got down at Omaha he found his guitar was broken. He approached United Airlines to pay for fixing the guitar. United was pretty indifferent to his requests with many excuses to not fix it. Being a musician he did what he does best, i.e. wrote a song titled United Breaks Guitars and posted it on YouTube. Within first 4 days, the video got 1.5 million views on YouTube. On Day 5 it was covered by every major news channel  causing a long lasting damage to United’s brand image. It is also worthy to note that United stock plunged 10% during this week (I am not claiming the reason for stock value plunge being this, but many analysts have drawn relationship between the PR disaster and stock price).

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.

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Posted in Marketing, Technology

Social Media: Advertising

Posted on July 30, 2011 | 3 Comments

With about 25% of all time spent on Internet being spent on social media properties like Facebook, Twitter and other networks, social media becomes an obvious choice for advertisers. I would argue about the effectiveness of advertising on social media platforms as compared to sponsored search results or ads on web portals, but with millions of eyeballs spending so much time there, it’s a compelling place for advertisers.

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!

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Posted in Advertising, Marketing, Technology

Emotions and social media based market research

Posted on July 22, 2011 | Leave a comment

Emotions play a big role in how people express themselves. In order to understand the market correctly and identify how people perceive a product, it is important to understand how people react emotionally to the product. To be a successful product it is necessary, in most cases, that people associate positive emotions to the product. To have a consumer base that is emotionally attached to the product is a prized possession for any brand.

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.

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Posted in Marketing