Newsletter February 2012
Industry News
The global impact of social media was evidenced this past week as Social Media Week ( SMW ) hosted more than 1,000 events in cities throughout the U.S., Canada, Asia, Europe and Latin America.
Nearly 275 social media forums were held in New York City alone, and with substantial attendance. I became immersed in the conversation-rich stream of several of these forums in which questions posed by the audience gave testimony to the heightened level of interest in “best practices” and tools able to harness the chaos of big data across industries. And if you ever doubted the economic or humanitarian value of social media analytics, read Steve Lohr’s February 11 article The Age of Big Data in the New York Times.
Testimony to the creative hybrid approach now expected of market researchers by their brand clients, is a forum titled “The Evolving Role of Digital in the Purchase Process,” produced by SMW and the Advertising Research Foundation ( ARF ). Panelists elaborated on the effective use of social listening and analytics tools by qualitative researchers in the intelligent design of quantitative research. Triangulation of methodologies and the adoption of social media insights tools no longer are an option in market research but an imperative in the new C2B research paradigm. Critical to understanding, but also anticipating consumer behavior, the new researcher must adopt a holistic attitude to what constitutes buying pattern. Emphasizing the need to circumnavigate your brand by thinking outside the brand category, Belle Frank, EVP , Director of Strategy & Research,Y&R, stated not to discount a single social insights tool available.
Another of my favorite NYC forums—Social Media HAS Changed the World –took place at Bloomberg headquarters, a venue itself emblematic of the transformative energy social media represents as a transparent and authentic shape shifter of society. Here the panel from the nonprofit and NGO sectors revealed how social media tools impact their mission—from the American Red Cross following a Twitter #bathtub hash tag trail from Jasper to identify tornado stranded victims to hash tag streams from Haiti seeking local disaster relief. Other groups like DoSomething.org and DonorsChoose spoke of using social media tools to help match program support. And among UNICEF’s creative application of social media tools, it identifies key social inequality issues— such as the underutilization of digital by Turkish girls— that give the NGO an opportunity to recruit key influencers as ambassadors for social change.
While not novel, B2B social media is further leveraging professional networking tools like LinkedIn in new modes to source root cause, and even reverse such enterprise level dilemmas as vendor switching. In such a use example, John Bell, Global Managing Director, Social@Ogilvy, said the LinkedIn tool facilitated the hosting of a CFO Group by IBM India’s CFO . This group hosting resulted in big lead generation attracting direct buyers. Lead generation was also a windfall resulting from Ogilvy’s efforts on behalf of its Dupont client, wherein they created a Sustainability Business Solutions professional online forum. Bell noted, however, that curating content alone would not suffice. It must also be joined with content creation.
Storytelling and content creation vs. curation was a common thread throughout the SMW forum discussions in New York City. In his Your Brand Is Batman blog, David Berkowitz alluded to the pressures felt by community managers having to constantly tell stories. He proposed the creation of new arcs in storytelling by brainstorming with other brand stakeholders, not only to share in the creative task but also to discover new social media conduits. Berkowitz suggests community managers take a page from the New Earth comic series and listen to Bruce Wayne: “There’s a lot we have to learn—about each other and about ourselves—before we can present ourselves to the public in any major fashion.”
What’s New in 2012
This year Localspeak has incorporated new paths in our practice: German and Spanish social media insights and analytics. The expansion of our NetBase NetBase C2B brand discovery insights validates and supports a new insight model that will prove to be a valuable and complementary component to both brand discovery and the market research process.
Developed with robust NLP computational linguistic science, NetBase language tools function within the same tool as English, and we have featured such brand case studies on our Globalspeak Blog . Amongst the brand search, analytical and data collection functions are advanced context filtering, word cloud topic highlights, adjustable timeline function, net sentiment analysis, buzz metrics, domain and source search and filtering capability. To date, we’ve used our Spanish social insights toolkit to gather social media insights for several brands: WeightWatchers , Tommy Hilfiger and Hallmark .
Additional value derived from the Spanish and German tools is the ability to export sound bites (verbatims) in Excel format, for any data set you want to theme map and analyze. These features include brand snapshots—automatically generated pie and bar charts—analytical visualizations of brand attributes such as sentiment, emotions, behaviors, likes, dislikes, and automated attributes comparison charting. We also will be adding social media discovery insights in French, Italian and Portuguese later this year.
Blog News – Latino Social 2012 Campaign Digest
With the election year upon us, Localspeak has launched our Latino Social 2012 Campaign Digest within our blog. Intended to track the social media pulse of Latino voters using the NetBase Spanish analytics tool, we so far have examined early campaign season sentiment for President Obama and GOP contender Mitt Romney .
The Latino Social 2012 Campaign Digest will track issues raised by Hispanic voters and their sentiment on topics, as well as listen—in Spanish—to discover why these voters feel the way they do. By theme mapping their commentary, we gain insight into the emotional value of the language they use in social media.
As veteran political handlers and seasoned PR pros are learning, the value of being able to access real-time social analytics for a candidate and/or issue is critical to being able to customize messaging at every twist and turn in the race. Social listening and analytics tools like NetBase Scorecard, a real-time net sentiment and issues tracker, is ideal for instantly detecting a political misstep, a polling swing in candidate rank, or issue sentiment change. In combination with NetBase Workbench analytics, early root cause detection of voter sentiment can be isolated and addressed immediately to thwart leading edge loss.
Industry News
The global impact of social media was evidenced this past week as Social Media Week ( SMW ) hosted more than 1,000 events in cities throughout the U.S., Canada, Asia, Europe and Latin America.
Nearly 275 social media forums were held in New York City alone, and with substantial attendance. I became immersed in the conversation-rich stream of several of these forums in which questions posed by the audience gave testimony to the heightened level of interest in “best practices” and tools able to harness the chaos of big data across industries. And if you ever doubted the economic or humanitarian value of social media analytics, read Steve Lohr’s February 11 article The Age of Big Data in the New York Times.
Testimony to the creative hybrid approach now expected of market researchers by their brand clients, is a forum titled “The Evolving Role of Digital in the Purchase Process,” produced by SMW and the Advertising Research Foundation ( ARF ). Panelists elaborated on the effective use of social listening and analytics tools by qualitative researchers in the intelligent design of quantitative research. Triangulation of methodologies and the adoption of social media insights tools no longer are an option in market research but an imperative in the new C2B research paradigm. Critical to understanding, but also anticipating consumer behavior, the new researcher must adopt a holistic attitude to what constitutes buying pattern. Emphasizing the need to circumnavigate your brand by thinking outside the brand category, Belle Frank, EVP , Director of Strategy & Research,Y&R, stated not to discount a single social insights tool available.
Another of my favorite NYC forums—Social Media HAS Changed the World –took place at Bloomberg headquarters, a venue itself emblematic of the transformative energy social media represents as a transparent and authentic shape shifter of society. Here the panel from the nonprofit and NGO sectors revealed how social media tools impact their mission—from the American Red Cross following a Twitter #bathtub hash tag trail from Jasper to identify tornado stranded victims to hash tag streams from Haiti seeking local disaster relief. Other groups like DoSomething.org and DonorsChoose spoke of using social media tools to help match program support. And among UNICEF’s creative application of social media tools, it identifies key social inequality issues— such as the underutilization of digital by Turkish girls— that give the NGO an opportunity to recruit key influencers as ambassadors for social change.
While not novel, B2B social media is further leveraging professional networking tools like LinkedIn in new modes to source root cause, and even reverse such enterprise level dilemmas as vendor switching. In such a use example, John Bell, Global Managing Director, Social@Ogilvy, said the LinkedIn tool facilitated the hosting of a CFO Group by IBM India’s CFO . This group hosting resulted in big lead generation attracting direct buyers. Lead generation was also a windfall resulting from Ogilvy’s efforts on behalf of its Dupont client, wherein they created a Sustainability Business Solutions professional online forum. Bell noted, however, that curating content alone would not suffice. It must also be joined with content creation.
Storytelling and content creation vs. curation was a common thread throughout the SMW forum discussions in New York City. In his Your Brand Is Batman blog, David Berkowitz alluded to the pressures felt by community managers having to constantly tell stories. He proposed the creation of new arcs in storytelling by brainstorming with other brand stakeholders, not only to share in the creative task but also to discover new social media conduits. Berkowitz suggests community managers take a page from the New Earth comic series and listen to Bruce Wayne: “There’s a lot we have to learn—about each other and about ourselves—before we can present ourselves to the public in any major fashion.”
What’s New in 2012
This year Localspeak has incorporated new paths in our practice: German and Spanish social media insights and analytics. The expansion of our NetBase NetBase C2B brand discovery insights validates and supports a new insight model that will prove to be a valuable and complementary component to both brand discovery and the market research process.
Developed with robust NLP computational linguistic science, NetBase language tools function within the same tool as English, and we have featured such brand case studies on our Globalspeak Blog . Amongst the brand search, analytical and data collection functions are advanced context filtering, word cloud topic highlights, adjustable timeline function, net sentiment analysis, buzz metrics, domain and source search and filtering capability. To date, we’ve used our Spanish social insights toolkit to gather social media insights for several brands: WeightWatchers , Tommy Hilfiger and Hallmark .
Additional value derived from the Spanish and German tools is the ability to export sound bites (verbatims) in Excel format, for any data set you want to theme map and analyze. These features include brand snapshots—automatically generated pie and bar charts—analytical visualizations of brand attributes such as sentiment, emotions, behaviors, likes, dislikes, and automated attributes comparison charting. We also will be adding social media discovery insights in French, Italian and Portuguese later this year.
Blog News – Latino Social 2012 Campaign Digest
With the election year upon us, Localspeak has launched our Latino Social 2012 Campaign Digest within our blog. Intended to track the social media pulse of Latino voters using the NetBase Spanish analytics tool, we so far have examined early campaign season sentiment for President Obama and GOP contender Mitt Romney .
The Latino Social 2012 Campaign Digest will track issues raised by Hispanic voters and their sentiment on topics, as well as listen—in Spanish—to discover why these voters feel the way they do. By theme mapping their commentary, we gain insight into the emotional value of the language they use in social media.
As veteran political handlers and seasoned PR pros are learning, the value of being able to access real-time social analytics for a candidate and/or issue is critical to being able to customize messaging at every twist and turn in the race. Social listening and analytics tools like NetBase Scorecard, a real-time net sentiment and issues tracker, is ideal for instantly detecting a political misstep, a polling swing in candidate rank, or issue sentiment change. In combination with NetBase Workbench analytics, early root cause detection of voter sentiment can be isolated and addressed immediately to thwart leading edge loss.