Archive for the ‘Social Media Measurement’ Category
August 12, 2009
In the context of marketing and sales, the concept of ‘engagement’ carries increasing gravitas, and yet is still difficult to conceptualise through a single definition. Quantifying the blighter is harder still. The fascination with engagement stems from its potential to make-up for any shortfall in customer contact a brand may have in the areas of reach and frequency. What a brand fails to achieve in market share or regularity of contact (or feedback), the brand might compensate through share-of-mind. In the case of mobile phones, market share (unit sales) is dominated by the likes of Nokia and Samsung, with Blackberry and iPhone well behind. The put the quantity of sales into perspective, Samsung Australia sells approximately 3m units a year (second only to Nokia), compared with the 400,000 iPhones currently in operation in Australia (just under 4% of the market). Yet, in terms of digital chatter, comprising opinion, advice, questions and general consumer feedback, there is a massive discrepancy between brands, this time favouring Apple and Blackberry handsets. In short, what these brands lack in market share, they more than compensate for in terms of communities openly engaging in a dialogue, sometimes quiet passionately, about a mass-produced consumer item. The Sentiment Index graph below illustrates the scale of digital chatter between brands, with the iPhone alone having a 10-to-1 advantage against most competiting brands. By quantifying engagement in this manner, does this incentivise brand managers to do the cost-benefit of investing in an engagement strategy ahead of traditional reach and frequency filters? 
Source: Victrix Media
August 1, 2009
With news of Kazaa ‘back from the dead’ and the Pirate Bay now a little more mercenary (how long before the name changes to Tariff Bay?), the world of music downloads has lost a few of its high profile superstars to perhaps a misguided strategy that file-sharers will change their spots when cash-for-content becomes the mantra.
Yet despite the best intentions to swing heavy music consumers towards a ‘all-you-can-eat’ subscription model, the world of P2P goes on, swallowing terabytes of data every hour like a deep space vortex, distributing ‘leaks’ at near light speed. Faced with such gravitational pull (and distribution efficiencies), an uneasy truce seems to have descended between parties in these so-called copyright wars.
While legal machinations seem to be giving way to technical monitoring options, there is a measurable rise in deliberate marketing tactics designed to take the sting out of ‘leaks’ through the seeding of free sample tracks, either directly into social media communities or via an established media partner.
Whether you conform to the ‘music is water’ theory, or uphold a solid, unerring position on copyright, the reality of local P2P music download activity holds a simple objective truth: it is pervasive, and involves the vast majority of consumers who regularly attend live music performances, or take an active interest in maintaining a music library of sorts. New, or rehashed payment models bolted onto P2P ‘brands’ will not alter this behaviour in any material way.
Right now almost 78m music tracks are downloaded across Australia each week, with the top track alone, usually a mainstream, high-rotation artist (Black Eyed Peas, for example), recording more than 500,000 downloads on a consistent basis, while a local hip hop group, like Hilltop Hoods (Chase That Feeling), which again has the backing of local radio, might record up to 188,000 downloads. By comparison, an indie group like British India (God is Dead, Meet the Kids), with a much lower rotation, records just over 9,000 downloads.
Of course, the correlation between airplay and downloads is not that clear cut., or even that strong.
Black Eyed Peas (Boom Boom Pow), for example, records 571,687 downloads concurrently with 271 spins for the week, which equates to 2,109 downloads per spin. By comparison, Taylor Swift (Love Story) reports 422,780 downloads concurrent with just 18 spins, or 23,487 downloads per spin.
Other artists with high download rates but low spins include: Chris Brown (Forever), 267,982 downloads with five spins; Rihana (Disturbia), 283,557 downloads with seven spins and Dizee Rascal (Dance With Me), 137,585 downloads with just five spins.
Clearly, with so much data on local P2P activity now coming to light, there is still much more to understand about what the download market can define in terms of niche music tastes and what insights they provide to justify this type of analysis becoming an accurate barometer to music trends and, more importantly, emerging stars.
August 1, 2009
Recently, a rather old-fashioned word crept into our popular vocabulary - “narrative”. The thematic qualities of this term resemble a story’s ‘arc’ or the more sinister ‘sub-text’.
Whatever the moniker, this broader, almost minimalist approach to identifying what actuality matters in the ‘scheme of things’ is both a waste saver and a potential red light to crowds powered by the sheep mentality.
In the language of the dismal science, a macro-trend is just such an arc. Standing back, absorbing this vista means taking in a new perspective, and perhaps a new conclusion.
Such an approach has a habit of making the otherwise absurd, obtuse and the downright ambiguous as clear as crystal.
Take for example the synopsis that, for at the least next 50 years, Australia will never suffer a recession, a slow-down perhaps, but never two quarters of negative growth.
This brash, binary call isn’t presumptive at all. Taking your eyes off the next pothole, and back onto the horizon, you realise Asia’s middle class isn’t yet, relatively speaking, a mass market; that’s still a century into the future.
In the meantime, Australia’s minerals, agricultural produce and intellectual property will be sucked northwards like a twister in the sky, fuelling smelters, stomachs and minds.
A macro-trend of that magnitude won’t be diverted, or distracted, by a case of broker embezzlement, Chicken flu or even the next Al Qaeda suitcase bomb.
Ergo, Australia is recession-proof for the next half century.
Another macro trend relates to the long-term consequences of a networked world and the digitisation of assets, particularly intellectual property.
Social media in all its clever and hard-to-monetise guises, is its own type of macro trend. Like the ‘golden rule’ that economic growth requires the consumption of commodities, the ‘rule’ of social media is that the more people broadcast their lives, the more self-aware they become of the ‘content’ of their routines, including the experiences and memories that punctuate their days.
Put plainly, the larger and more active our digital networks become, the more we need to entertain these ‘audiences’ with worthy anecdotes and clever impressions.
Social networks are not sustained by the mundane, the average or ‘middle of the road’, they glow white hot with what we can muster that is ‘jagged and shiny’.
From this point onwards, the macro trend we call social media takes on a new persona – a mass audience and mass market for the unique, the tangible, and the experiential that cannot be replicated by processing lines of code.
Importantly, this shift is not based on the division of wealth, where the less well off are subjected to a commoditised, homogenised existence. On the contrary, the attribute of wealth is in fact neutered by the intellectual and creative elements that increasingly dictate terms. The artisan, the scientist, the explorer – these are the new rule makers. They personify a new aesthetic, largely detached from the materialism that has characterised the ‘acquisitor age’ (Ravi Batra).
It is this aesthetic that now ignites a more authentic introspection on the part of so many more individuals; indeed, a more widespread perspective on what contributes to happiness and wellbeing.
This search for quality, uniqueness and beauty is nothing new, only the scale of the phenomenon has altered; a scale made possible by the diffusion of network technology and our desire to broadcast ourselves committing to new experiences and a re-weighting of particular values.
The trajectory of this macro trend, or social arc, is unstoppable. Being on the cusp of this mass movement, where an increasing number of individuals now put their lives, their decisions and their associations into perspective, means institutions likewise must now recast their own assumptions about consumer motivations and political relations.
May 13, 2009
Sulphur gas lays ankle deep, dressing the town square like a morbid magic show. The once distant echoes of cannon fire are now a persistent percussion movement, with undertones of service boots scrambling across broken glass and through shallow puddles. All the while, townsfolk play their games and make light of an abominable situation.
MySpace 2010 and the fight for survival.
The final Google ‘mortgage’ payment to MySpace is scheduled for June 2010; US$75m out of a US$900m deal, and the last serious money left in the forecast.
Arguably, this advertising agreement has been the only reason News Corp has persisted with propping up MySpace for so long, leaving the future of the social media behemoth in serious question post-contract. How did we get to this point? 70 million world citizens zipping to and from the mothership, yet no value creation? Actually, there’s plenty of value, its just all subjective and personal, not objective and commercial.
For all its sordid, trivial and intensely personal streams of consciousness, social media (collectively) is a much loved shanty town. Yet, it groans under the weight of rubbish, clutter and poor (and poorly designed) infrastructure. The land lords are going broke anyway, but the cash drain is accentuated by the increasing disengagement of residents.
In April 2008, for example, almost 42% of Facebook visitors also associated themselves with MySpace. In November that same year, that figure slipped to 35%. As of April 2009, just 28% of Facebook users had any association with MySpace (Source: Nielsen Online). This rapid decline in shared audiences between the two has resulted from a massive drop in the monthly MySpace audience and the rapid growth in FaceBook numbers.
In fact since April 2008, Facebook’s monthly AU audience has grown 80%, to more than 4.7m UAs, compared with a 26% decline in monthly UAs for MySpace over the same period to 1.9m. There is an indisputable trend downwards for the once Golden Child of the News Corp empire; a hard lesson which will be taught to every social media poster child - without an objective value, implicitly agreed to by end-users, social media business models have no longevity (or saviour), save for a quick buy-out devoid of due diligence.
Given the diabolical commercial nature of social media, a more interesting philosophical question in this period of bank and automotive nationalisation, would be to ask: should governments (and which governments?) step in and financially support a social media entity - arguably providing an important personal service to hundreds of millions of citizens - if it threatens to file for Chapter 11? And if bankruptcy is the result, what’s the fate of the Terrabytes of data sitting on servers in the rusting warehouses of Cleveland, Oxford and New York?
May 11, 2009
The social media phenomenon has attained a perception of commercial value because of how it has quickly generated a massive world-wide audience within a certain demographic profile. Combined with a relatively intimate framework, social media is now a prolific sub-set to every media buying opportunity.
In short, social media (including that rather quaint term, micro-blogging) has become a type of arterial network through which so much of our 1st and 2nd degree knowledge (friends and family first, interests and curiosities, second) relies.
Attached to these streams of consciousness are product and marketing statements. These commercial elements weave their way through online discussions, opinions and comments, but rarely are they tackled in terms of what value (or lack of it) the associated products receive from being part of this intimate, personalised network.
In the case of the music eco-system, social media has become an integral part of talent discovery, marketing and sales. Because commerce and art are so intertwined in this instance, it is logical that online ‘chatter’ should be measured or indexed, which in turn, produces the necessary insights to affect marketing strategies and sales results.
In this example, Music Sentiment Index or MSI, is now being applied to music artists and their album releases. The MSI is quantifying the chatter in a given time period based on the number of mentions, as well as the ‘quality of exposure’ of each mention. The former is relatively straightforward, the latter, however, less so.
In this case, quality refers to the ‘authority’ number carried by each site, blog and forum; a number based on a similar ‘links-in’ algorithm used by Google, though in this instance, the links originate from social media properties only.
In this example, the MSI for Eminem’s Relapse album in the weeks leading up to its launch on the 19th May has been something of a roller coaster ride, beginning with an initial burst of venom between fans and detractors about the album’s first single release. With traditional news sites blasting out headlines about Eminem’s first album in four years, the blog and forum space went ballistic, pushing the MSI beyond 1,000 in weeks four and five.
Eventually, every product, individual and event with its fortunes tied to social media ‘chatter’, including the leverage of the much-hyped ‘influencer’ segment, will require an index measure to validate performance and an ROI. The really interesting work begins when digital agencies, advertisers and publishers attempt to build MSI-type standards, or a common currency, to allow for benchmarking. Something else to add to the IAB’s to-do list!
May 4, 2009
An interesting article published in the UK last week asked the provocative question: are we drowning in music? In other words, has the currency of music been irretrievably de-valued by the rising tied of mediocrity? (And no, that wasn’t a mixed metaphor).
This post isn’t about to answer that question, but the insight does provides a nice introduction into the world of music entertainment and the growing plethora of online, music-related sites. In Australia, the ranks of music streaming and retail services will shortly be joined by the likes of Guvera, MyDJ and the gorilla of them all, MySpace Music - the latter scheduled for release before Christmas.
We’re not short on services, but what about demand? At what point do we reach saturation where the audience hygiene audience factors start to drop, and in turn, the CPM rates for ad-based music services also start to weaken? But that’s a whole other can of worms.
There are two market metrics Victrix uses here: Nielsen and Comscore. The former suggests online music entertainment has in fact peaked, and now skims along at about 3m uniques a month (March 09) - down from 3.4m in March 08.
In comparison, Comscore considers the glass half-full, and reckons the audience for online music entertainment has grown 21% in the last 12 months, to 4.3m uniques a month (March 09). Again, this isn’t about picking a fight with one or both of the world’s largest panel methodologies; I’ll leave you to ponder the reasons for the discrepancies in audience figures before a more informed opinion is expressed. Both figures exclude online music retailers (and associated applications).
However, where one platform seems to reflect a depleted, almost exhausted market for music entertainment, the other is reporting double-digit growth; not just in terms of the overall sector, but for individual players, including Last.FM - up 115% to 342,000 uniques a month - and even locals visiting MySpace Music (US) - up 72% to 935,000 uniques a month.
Other strong players include MTV Networks (again AUS visitors to US sites) up 60% year-on-year, Universal Music Group up 52%, and the ABC’s Triple J, up 25%.
These audience stats aren’t the makings of an exhausted or confused listening audience. Far from it. In fact, with improved AI and smarter curatorial processes (behavioural targeting), online music entertainment will only evolve into a more relevant service offering.
May 4, 2009
Ok, so Victrix is a little late jumping onto the Twitter bandwagon, but given the hysteria surrounding Swine Flu - with little justification as to why the WHO went to DefCon 5 - maybe a little ‘late to market’ isn’t such a bad policy after all?
This is a case study of how Twitter Intelligence (TI) can sometimes having a profound impact on our (the brand’s) understanding of the consumer’s perspective as well as the questions and concerns which are typically raised in a word-of-mouth scenario.
And this is a major point: I’m not aware of anyone yet describing Twitter technology as a method to measure and monitor word-of-mouth, especially in metric terms such as ‘rate of diffusion’, ‘positive/negative’ sentiment, brand and competitor awareness.
In this example, we have comments, opinions and chats associated with one of Samsung’s most recent mobile phone releases, the Omnia touchscreen. Using PeerIn’s Sentiment Metrics platform we have tracked and quantified these references online - across typical websites, but more interestingly across social media and user-generated content. Included in this catch-all is Twitter communications.
This analysis captures references to “Samsung” and “Omnia” and identifies more than more 20,000 items across blogs (including micro-blogging), forums, websites and news services. In percentage terms, the split is 51%, 26%, 15% and 8% respectively. Micro-blogging, or Twitter, accounts for just over 1% of all comments, which is relatively high for a product-related ‘event’.
However, what it lacks in scale, the Twitter channel more than makes up for in sheer chutzpah. In others words, when you’re limited to 140 characters, your opinions, questions and answers are going to be couched in a very concise, direct and forthright manner. There’s simply no room or patience to waffle, procrastinate or pontificate. Though there’s plenty of opportunity to market, or dare I say it, spam.
In the context of understanding a mindset, the Samsung-related Twitters are pure gold.
“Phones I have my eye on Samsung Omnia and HTC Touch Pro2″
“got lots of games and most importantly a GPS for my Samsung Omnia that is free…holla!!”
“Does anyone want to swap a Samsung Omnia for an iphone?? It would make my day and I would actually think you are crazier than me”
“I returned the samsung omnia and got an htc touch pro…spent all day yesterday unlocking and flashing it…sweet as betch now”
“Goddamn Samsung Omnia. You’ve broken my heart and I’m thinking about leaving you for a Blackberry Curve. It’s not me, its you.”
“Nokia N97 comes with disappointing hardware. Samsung Omnia HD looks better and better every day.”
In these few examples, you have cases of competitor positioning (and awareness) as well as consumer insights into hardware and software configurations.
There are many other examples, but one thing Victrix has learnt very quickly about Twitter: don’t take everything on face value. While no doubt a flexible, responsive and convenient communications channel, Twitter is also increasingly susceptible to astro-turfing techniques, where product placements clumsily infiltrate innocuous Twitter comments. Case in point:
“What a beautiful sunset. I’m sitting by a blue lake and listening to Michael Buble from my Samsung Omnia.”
And you thought the close-up of the Ford badge in Casino Royale was gratuitous!
September 4, 2008
Events at the Republican National Convention (RNC) in the US have seriously electrified the blogosphere and comments pages across the Internet. More accurately, it has been Sarah Palin’s introduction to the Republican ticket and her acceptance speech which has created some very serious seismic activity, outdoing even Steve Jobs and his iPhone hyperbole.
From Yahoo!’s poll of polls and TechPresident through to Politicaltrends and Wonkosphere, the measurement of online commentary and sentiment has never been so prolific or detailed. In short, the sudden reframing of this campaign has crystalised some very stark differences between all four candidates across the two tickets, effectively polarising general opinion, and more importantly, reducing the independent vote to a negliable number.
The result? A massive influx of individuals prepared to step forward and be counted by their words, many of whom, it might be assumed, have previously been observers (readers) rather than contributors.
This is a digital scream-fest, consuming the worlds of both UGC and professional media. Every story, video, sound-byte attached to the RNC, and Palin’s speech in particular, is being hammered by both liberals and conservatives with a blend reasoned opinion and out-right vitriol.
And the result? An immediate change in online sentiment, with McCain racing to intersect Obama’s lead. Palin’s introduction has been a game-changing event, for better or worst, and online momentum has resoundingly swung in the Republican’s favour. It is this real-time measurement of opinion (though skewed in so may ways) which acts as a very powerful barameter on issues, personalities and tone.
It also puts into perspective the relatively static social media space, in particular Facebook and MySpace and the weight previously given to such stats as Obama’s and McCain supporters (Obama outnumbering McCain more than 5 to 1 on Facebook and more than 6 to 1 on MySpace).
No doubt there is some correlation between funds raised and friends enlisted, but the true test seems to be whether these ’supporters’ are resolute enough to go in and fight for their candidate as the two party machines open up all guns in a broadside battle? The Palin factor was the opening salvo.
August 31, 2008
Curiously, the innovation investments made in the spaces of search and social media seem to be paralleling one another. Both areas are increasingly recognising need to emphasis quality over scale.
In other words, both platforms have matured in recent years to a point where their diffusion and ubiquity has reached a scale where their value, in terms of search results and the quality of personal networks, is arguably diminishing.
In other words, a tipping point has been reached where diminshing returns are setting in. A response to this system failure (in relative terms), is an increasing range of innovations to do with vertical search systems (or databases) and subject or audience-specific social networks have emerged. Interestingly, the one subject area which is straddling both is health - witness the beta of Google Health and Health 2.0 social networks like Patients Like Me and Organised Wisdom.
In the case of social networks, current set-ups simply do not offer the prerequisite integrity to give members confidence in crowd ‘wisdom’. Every network has ‘influencers’, but in a large scale operation like Facebook or MySpace, their influence diminishes over time for two key reasons: fewer people have confidence in their opinion (diminshing credibility), and they are seen to be less likely to resemble the average member as the network grows.
Further, as the number of nodes in the network increases, the search to confirm an individual’s expertise in a particular subject area becomes more laborious, presenting a real barrier to the ongoing efficiency of the network as a conduit for reliable information. Enter the emergence of specialist social networks.
In the case of health, the trend is being spearheaded by primarily by patients, or at the very least, individuals affected by a particular illness, either directly or via friends and family. This commonality of experience, told through stories, opinion and advice, represents a powerful influence on individuals who feel isolated through a lack of support, or overwhelmed by a plethora of professional advice.
To breach the gap comes social media technologies and platforms operating within a far more specialist environment. As the following graph illustrates, the sources most preferred by people seeking answers on matters of health include the Internet and doctors, followed at a distance by relatives/friends/co-workers.
In this research (iCrossing, January 2008), the Internet was most nominated because it had the ability to put people in contact with individuals and/or their personal stories telling of their own experiences. It is this desire for first-hand knowledge which so completely overwhelms every other potential source of news, and for that matter, comfort.
The Health 2.0 phenomenon represents social media’s ‘higher calling’, far removed from the banalities of current systems.
July 6, 2008
Digital advertising is a peculiarly asymmetrical place. When the effectiveness of one piece in the strategy begins to wain, another piece is devised or conceptualised. The coincidence of a decline in the online display market currently (or at least its confirmed slow-down) with the emergence of social media (and associated applications), as a panecea for this increasing budgetry void, should not be lost on anyone.
Yet in the haste to create a new poster child (mobile is next), a healthy dose of scepticism has gone MIA. This is not to say social media technologies are a convenient but ineffectual fade - far from it. This maturing of the Internet to include peer networking, open sourcing and meta-data architecture is clearly the genesis of a transformation in communications which will impact every facet of human endeavour in the long-term.
Like Grandpa Jo said about Wonka Vision: “It will change the world.”
Yet, what has been the overwhelming response of the commercial world to this obvious inflection point in world history? In short, to give itself a choice between either a CPM or CPC deal! Is this as good as it gets?
As previously discussed on these pages, the context of most social media platforms experiencing high levels of activity and recency is one of High Context, where networks of individuals discuss, debate and share information of a personal and private nature. There is simply no room for advertising and its ROI considerations, no matter how sophisticated the targeting.
This is not to say there is no allowance for commercial entities to engage a market via social media architecture. In fact, if done with consideration of its High Context pedigree, a commercial social media channel can have some extraordinarily positive implications for the brand.
Faced with an option to design and build a customer-centric social network, or at the very least, pay good money to participate in a more broadly designed social paltform (like Facebook), the organisation must recognise the very investment in technology which empowers customers to ‘collaborate’ is already an implicit act of brand reinforcement.
In other words, the organisation is now in the game but should play in the backroom, mindful that being subtle in a High Context environment will be always be recognised by participants; there is simply no need to force the issue.
The challenge, however, is to avoid building short-term ROI templates around these social media investments, where next quarter’s sales figures have a higher priority than longer-term customer retention issues. If this can’t be avoided, then the advice is simple: avoid social media altogether as a marketing mechanism.
If, however, the organisation is prepared to commit to social media architecture as part of a broader CRM and Customer Experience Management (CEM) strategy, then consider the following points as a guide to building the required dynamic:
- Can the platform be designed around the particular needs of customers as opposed to a list of wants?
- Recognise that a customer base fragmented by geography, socio-demographics, technology and even psychology will enrich the platform, and hence provide greater value back to customers. Fragmentation/segmentation like this is a strength;
- Always provide the option of anonymity without penalising the user through a lesser experience. The architecture’s priority is to encourage collaboration between customers, not to probe into a customer’s identity;
- Insist on transparency with regards to issues and opinions expressed by constituents. The more diversity of opinion, the higher the incidence of collaboration;
- Encourage storytelling around experiences before encouraging customers to open their wallets;
- Be prepared to intervene in issues by way of professional advice; never let matters go unresolved.
If these points suggest the organisation is expected to make a commitment to understand a customer’s lifestyle and their own networks, then that is indeed the right conclusion. If, however, the resident CMO is scared of the ‘C’ word, then for the sake of not wasting everyone’s time, the CMO should also drop “social media” from their lexicon as well.
