Top 50 most followed people in social media. Does it really matter?

Posted on January 9, 2012 | Comments Off on Top 50 most followed people in social media. Does it really matter?

Every other week you will see a list of top 50 most followed people in social media. The list normally consists of celebrities, sports stars, politicians and brands. The real question is are these most followed people on the social media the top influencers out there? There are two big issues which make the number of followers not map directly to the measure of influence.

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.

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Posted in Marketing, Technology

The art in science

Posted on January 3, 2012 | Comments Off on The art in science

Science is a very general term. So is art. In some sense art and science are opposites of each other and in other cases you can think of them being synonymous to each other. Without going much in the theory of the words, by science I mean something that is based on systematic study. Something that has numbers to back it. It has reasoning and logic behind it. On the other hand, by art I mean something that is subject to aesthetic criteria. Something that is beautiful, appealing and presentable.

I am a big believer in science. Numbers are awesome (though subject to interpretation) overall they prove something. When you do data analysis based on large sets of information, applying scientific algorithms can do wonders. It can generate patterns and extract information that is not even visible by naked eyes. That is specifically evident when you work with social media information. The data is overwhelming and algorithmic processes do an awesome job identifying the hidden knowledge.

But when you try to sell this science, you need something that is beautiful, appealing and presentable to people who are going to use it. That’s the role of art in a science heavy world. No matter how sophisticated software programs you write to extract information or how well you can process data to gain rich knowledge, till you can communicate that in an easy to consume manner, it is of no use. Add a pinch of art to your scientific prowess. Think who your customer is. What do they need? What language they understand? Then put your scientific findings in a way that is appealing to them. That will make them empowered by knowledge and take action on it. That will make your work really matter and make the science in the background worth more than anything else.

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Posted in Advertising, Technology

Adding perspective to demographic profiling

Posted on December 21, 2011 | Comments Off on Adding perspective to demographic profiling

Demographic profile is the most common way of defining consumer base in media and marketing industry. It lays the basis of how markets are segmented and consumers are grouped. Age, gender, social class, education level and occupation are some factors that define the demographic profile. Many businesses from television networks and movies to consumer goods and political parties put huge  reliance on demographic profile for making business decisions.

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.

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Posted in Business, Marketing

A campaign done right

Posted on December 8, 2011 | 1 comment

New York City; Shuttle S; Grand Central to Times Square. If you are looking for a campaign done right, that’s a great example right there.

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!

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Posted in Advertising

Cellphones and Market Research

Posted on November 23, 2011 | Comments Off on Cellphones and Market Research

Cellphones have had a profound impact on many things in this world. It has not only revolutionized telecom industry but has also left its mark on how many operations are conducted and industries function. I want to specifically talk about a couple of areas where cellphone is changing the dynamics of the game.

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.

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Posted in Business, Technology

From an advertising campaign to a social phenomenon

Posted on November 3, 2011 | 2 comments

In layman terms, the goal of any advertising campaign is to create awareness. But every once in a while it happens that the advertising campaign evolves to be something much bigger than the original purpose of its inception. A few that come in mind are Santa Claus, Men in Blue and Wavin’ Flag.

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.

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Posted in Advertising

Role of brand pages in social media

Posted on October 30, 2011 | Comments Off on Role of brand pages in social media

Back in 1990s there was a time when websites started becoming essential part of the online identity of companies. Any company irrespective of the industry it operates in got to have a website. A website acts more like the face of the company on the Internet. In early 2000s, this was followed by the blogs. Blogs became a great way for companies to interact with consumers, answer questions in an understandable and easy to navigate format.

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.

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Posted in Marketing, Technology

Social Influence: importance of experts and mavens

Posted on October 23, 2011 | Comments Off on Social Influence: importance of experts and mavens

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 | Comments Off on Innovative approach towards market research sampling

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 | Comments Off on Chaos in Social Media

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