Baking a social media cake

April 27, 2009

(The other day a client was probing about our methodology. They were asking lots of smart questions and as we worked through the answers, they asked me to send a write-up. Technically, it isn’t a social media cake, but a social media analysis and insight cake. Here it is.)

During our discussion, you asked how we bake this cake – here’s my diatribe answer to that question. (BTW, baking a cake turns out to be a great analogy!)

To bake a cake you need ingredients (data), mixers and pans (tools) and cooks (strategists).  Your questions were focused on developing a better understanding of each one of these. (Disclaimer, I’m not the CTO or the head of research, so my answers may be a bit shallow.  I promise that I’m happy to get both/either of those people (cc’d above) on the phone to dive into more detail.)

Any good cake starts with the right ingredients.  For MQ this means starting with the right data.  The right data is always category, project and client specific.    Here are our thoughts about data.

  1. Including the data you want while excluding the data you don’t what is hard.  We discussed the Visa example, and you have experienced this with your brand.  De-spamming and de-duping is an important part of the job.
  2. Brand mentions range from 2% to 30% of the relevant data (depending on category, so only collecting brand mentions will miss most of the relevant conversation.
  3. It isn’t helpful to get all of the data.  (Splogs – or spam blogs have LOTS of brand mentions – but aren’t real and VERY hard to eliminate.   Focusing on and gathering the sites where the most people are participating virtually guarantees the elimination of Splogs.
  4. 5 years of expertise in solving the challenges above with a combination of technology tools and linguistic programming expertise provides MQ with a significant advantage over most of our competition.

You can’t bake a cake without measuring cups, mixers, whisks, spatulas, pans and an oven.  We can’t do our work without a broad sophisticated toolkit.  One of the fundamental challenges in analyzing large amounts of unstructured text data is that you simply can’t make sense of it in any sort of manual fashion.  Sophisticated software tools are the answer, but how those tools are developed and deployed makes a difference.

  1. Language is fluid over time and across categories.  Tools must be too.  Every one of our tools is parameter driven and allows the strategist to adjust the linguistic model and other parameters for the category and project at hand.
  2. Simple measures (counts, brand mentions, sentiment) are not useful for understanding why people do what they do and without understanding, we don’t gain the insight of what to do next.
  3. Understanding requires more sophisticated tools.   That is why we have tools for passion peaking, measuring motivations, word association, brand advocacy and many, many others.
  4. We have many tools available, but the tools used and the order of use is very project dependent.

Finally, you can’t bake a cake without a cook.  Well, I guess you can use a box mix from the grocery store and bake a cake without a cook, but if you have a special occasion and hire a chef to bake a cake, you don’t expect to get something from a box mix.  You expect a cake cooked to your specifications for your occasion.  You expect something unique, professional, surprising and delicious for your special occasion.  In our world, the dashboard and organized data providers are the box mixes.

MotiveQuest brings the experienced professional chef who will design and deliver a custom cake according to your exact interests, needs and specifications.

  1. Experience matters.  We have very sophisticated toolsets and it takes at least 6 months to get a strategist (most of whom have advanced degrees and backgrounds in consulting or planning) trained and productive.
  2. The tools are complex because the problems are complex.
  3. A single strategist is responsible for the entire project including data collection, organization, analysis, insights and recommendations.
  4. Each project has its own specifications and requirements.  Communication, solid project management and client involvement are all required to achieve good results.
  5. MotiveQuest Senior Leadership is deeply involved in every project to ensure results that meet your needs.

I will send the MQ capabilities presentation in another email.   Our case studies are very marketing (not data or technology) focused for a reason.  We don’t get hired to provide data or technology, but instead to solve real world marketing and communication problems.  I’ll be happy to provide more detail about any of them.

Thanks very much for your time on these issues, and I hope this helps answer some of your questions.

TO’B


Communities don’t care about brands

April 23, 2009

Does that seem like a provocative title? Well it kind-of is. Communities do care about brands, but perhaps not in the way you like to think. Communities are self organizing groups of like-minded people who gather to share information, opinions, and suggestions, make friends, get together, etc. Sometimes, a brand sits at the center of the community, but more often it doesn’t

(Here’s my deck on How Communities Work.)

We have done hundreds of projects over the last 6 years harvesting and analyzing community conversations to understand why people do what they do. Across all these projects, brand mentions are typically a fraction of all the community conversation. In food, brand mentions are in less than 5% of the conversations. In a highly brand involved community, like cars or cellphones brand mentions are rarely in more than 30% of the conversations.

If you are “brand monitoring” then you are missing between 70% and 95% of the relevant conversation.

If you (Mr. Brand) want to “connect” with communities what you need to do is study community issues, motivations and drivers first. Once you understand the community motivations, then you are ready to participate. Just remember this rule of thumb. Everything you (Mr. Brand) do in the community should go through the filter of community motivations.

Are you serving the community or are you using the community?

YMMV

TO’B


Lies, Damn Lies & Statistics

February 17, 2009

These three charts represent a case study in how data can be manipulated to tell a story. I’ll bet the one you saw the last week is the one on the bottom.

Tom O’Brien


Google and P&G

November 24, 2008

I’m sure most of you saw the front page WSJ article last week about Google and P&G. This is of great interest to me because it gets to the heart of one of my underlying hypotheses about why digital advertising will continue to grow at the expense of other media.

Right now brand marketers are way under-invested in digital marketing. All you have to do is see the chart below.  TV has less than 20% of the time but 44% of the spending.     Marketers are over invested in traditional media as compared to time spent there.

time-vs-spend

Sources: TNS Media Intelligence & Forrester Research

This has to change. The challenge, as I have learned from several of our client CMO’s is that it is really hard to spend money on digital, while it is relatively easy to shovel it out the door on 30 sec. TV spots.

We (agencies, researchers, etc.) need to work a lot harder to bring ideas to our clients on how to spend money and leverage programs via digital channels. As John Bell famously asks, if I spend another $100k on social media, what do I get?

TO’B


Potbelly’s Evanston Loves US

November 20, 2008

Turns out we are a key account for Potbelly’s in Evanston. They are right across the street from MotiveQuest World Headquarters and Tish makes a cookie run almost every afternoon. (Not to mention all the sandwiches!)

Yesterday Tish went over for a sandwich and they said “thank goodness you’re here – we just tried to deliver this box full of warm chocolate chip oatmeal cookies but we couldn’t figure out how to get up to your office” Tish came back to the office not only with her sandwich, but with a box full of warm cookies of the office.

They can count MotiveQuest as a Key Account for life!

TO’B


5 Things about Social Media

November 10, 2008

I had a call with a client today. They are a huge, global company, and we have been doing brand tracking & analysis for them for several years.

They have a newly formed social media team, and I had a call with them today. I thought their questions (and my answers) might be relevant to others as well. Here is my follow-up email:

—————————————————————————-

It was great to talk to you and your team just now.  You have a big (and exciting) job ahead; here are my thoughts.

  1. Social media is about human scale engagement – not technology
  2. SM is about relationships, not campaigns.  Plan accordingly
  3. SM cuts across silos.  It will involve marketing, product, customer service and legal (at least).  Doing it well will require C level approval AND support.
  4. Success in SM requires putting the community’s motivations first.  This is very hard for most companies to grasp.  It is not about selling something, but about getting people to love you so they will do more business with you.  A subtle, but important distinction.  Put the community’s motivations first.
  5. Successful SM will connect to something people are already passionate about.  Figure out what it is first.

I could go on, but you get the idea ;-)

Links & Info

Here are our decks on slideshare:

MotiveQuest SlideShare

You already read Groundswell – which I think is a really good book on this subject – here is my review of Groundswell.

Peter Kim @ Mashable: List of Social Media Marketing Examples

Another good one with lots of comments from Peter Kim: What is Social Media Marketing

Chris Brogan: A good Blog on social media marketing – pretty PR focused.

Jeremiah Owyang – analyst for Forrester has good coverage of SM but heavy on tools: Web Stratgy by Jeremiah

And finally, a really interesting and different social media execution: Layer Tennis – watch a match and you will get it – be sure to click thru the volleys.

http://layertennis.com/071026/

Take a look at the results the CS3 launch was a HUGE success for Adobe (and their agency – Goodby).

CS3 Launch

CS3 Launch

Call me if you have any questions or would like to discuss further –

TO’B


We’re Calling It – Obama 53%, McCain 46%

November 4, 2008

I don’t know if that is a landslide or not – but here is our prediction for the final popular vote tally.  I suspect the electoral college vote will be nowhere this close.

OBAMA:    53%

MCCAIN:  46%

(Yes, I know that doesn’t add up to 100%, there are other candidates.)

vote2

TO’B


Sara Palin & SNL: Josh Bernoff has Questions . . . .

October 23, 2008

We sent out an email blast last week about our BrandAdvocacy ‘08 website and got some questions back from Josh Bernoff at Forrester (blogging here).

Here are his questions – and our answers. (By the way, Josh’s questions were pretty representative of the questions we are getting from everyone.)

1. Is there a bias in people who create or react to content online towards the democratic and liberal candidates?

  • First, if you look at the trend data on Brandadvocay08 it is clear that sometimes Obama has led and sometimes McCain has led, so on a very simple level this does not seem to be true.
  • Second, when we created the dataset we were careful to create a representative dataset of both ordinary people and political commentators.  For example on the site we have links to one of each for Democrats http://www.topix.com/forum/us/democrat and for Republicans http://www.topix.com/forum/us/republican. We found that there are plenty of Republicans who are online also.
  • In addition we can look at the underlying constant of regression the CNN Poll of Polls and Obama’s Online Promoter™ Score to determine if there is an “online bias”.  The CNN Poll of Polls shows a constant of 50.8%, MQ’s OPS shows a constant of 49.6%.
  • MQ’s data does not reflect a particularly liberal bias, other slices of data might, if we look more recently perhaps one could be emerging but over the 9/1 to 10/20 time frame there doesn’t appear to be one.
  • This also depends on your belief in the bias of the poll of polls; I’m not a polling person and can’t say if there is a bias in the poll of polls.

2. Do people online just like to talk about the Wow activities (like Sarah Palin on Saturday Night Live) vs the real Issues?

  • Every day we highlight the words that are most highly correlated with each candidate.

  • They show what issues the nation is associating with each candidate.  Sometimes it is true that they focus on the Wow stories but we see that they are just as likely to be seriously discussing the real issues (taxes, God, wealth, etc).  Don’t underestimate the power of forums as a place everyday people share their fears and thoughts with others like them.  For example take a look at this discussion on Parenting.com’s forums

3. How does Online advocacy relate to traditional polls?

  • From one perspective, its apples and oranges, polls attempt to measure the outcome of the presidential election if it were held on a particular day, MQ is measuring the number of people who are advocating a particular candidate.
  • On the flip side, if you believe as we do that people advocating to each other is an important piece of the future success of brands, products (and candidates) then we hope to show that the candidate with the most advocates will be the winner of the election.
  • Important caveat, we don’t have an electoral college or battleground states so at best we can hope to use advocacy as an indicator of the popular vote.
  • Using the data from the CNN Poll of Polls as a comparison metric, HYPOTHETICALLY, let’s assume that CNN Poll of Polls represents “truth”, we can apply straight forward regression to determine if the Advocacy metric for Obama is statistically related to the Poll of Polls data.
  • Regression shows that Obama’s Online Promoter™ score is statistically significant in linkage to the CNN’s poll of Polls results at > 98%


  • Furthermore, we can look to see if perhaps MQ’s results might lead the traditional polling methods; the relation appears strongest at 4-days leading.

The strongest statistical link from Obama’s Online Promoter™ Score to the CNN Poll of Poll’s results appears when we make Obama’s

OPS a 4-day leading indicator of the Poll of Polls

Obviously this detailed post may raise even more questions – feel free to post them in the comments section.

TO’B


Hertz #1 By a Mile – Thanks Walter!

October 1, 2008

On Friday afternoon I returned to the Hertz LAX location at 12:30 PM with 1 hour until my flight left. If I didn’t make the flight, I would be stuck at LAX for at least 6 hours. To make things worse, I was flying on United – which at LAX is the last of 9 stops that the Hertz bus makes.

So I got out of the car and started sprinting toward the bus. Someone called out “Sir, Sir”. I turned around, thinking someone wanted to give me a receipt when a Hertz employee named Walter told me to get back in the car so he could drive me around to United.

We had a nice chat and Walter told me that LAX has a policy of trying to help disabled people, families and those running really late (like me) get to the terminal quickly.

Well, I made my plane and got home to see my family that night thanks to the initiative and efforts of Walter at LAX. This is a great example of one person going above and beyond the call of duty to help someone – and I definitely appreciate it.

Please pass on my thanks to Walter and to his supervisor.

Tom O’Brien
Hertz Fan Forevermore


Social Media Experts

September 30, 2008

Alex Hillman sure stirred up a lot of emotion with his post over at Mashable about social media experts – How to Know if You Should Fire Your Social Media Consultant.

Go read the post for yourself, but all I needed to see to agree was Reason #1:

“If they recommend a Twitter campaign”

Like Alex, I am a twitter fan, (@tomob) and I agree with him, it is no place to start. Getting “social media” is a big deal. It is asking corporations to act like human beings and become an integral part of the community that exists around their products and brands.

Being an integral part of the community means:

  1. It is a relationship, not a campaign
  2. Community motivations get served first – not yours
  3. You have to contribute
  4. You have to be real – open, honest, direct, transparent

This is not something that can be outsourced. Outsourcing community involvement is like outsourcing friendship. It really can’t be done effectively.

With respect to “Social Media Consultants” the answer is the same as it always was. No, we’re not going to have licensing or standards. Those of us on the Vendor side (me @ MotiveQuest) have to be clear both about what we will and won’t do. Anyone who says they do it all is just lying. Those of you on the buyer side have to ramp up the due diligence. Ask for and call references. Do some research. Sort the wheat from the chaff.

Finally, this transformation is not going to be easy. Establishing relationships with your customers and communities (is that “Social Media?) is hard work. It cuts across the silos. It will require getting Marketing, PR, Customer Service, Engineering/Product, Legal and Exec all on board. It will require real people making real efforts to connect every day.

Good Luck!

TO’B