NM Incite provides leading marketers and enterprises with “social media intelligence” that enables them to develop a sustainable competitive advantage through high quality insights, metrics and advice. Our world-class analysts and social media consultants leverage Nielsen’s unique technology platform and global footprint to interpret social media trends and insights. Our strategic thought leadership and problem solving approach brings out the capabilities of our clients to fully participate in the process, confidently transform their organizations and make a measurable business impact.

 NM Incite provides the opportunity to expand my work beyond simply using SM for research (powerful though that is) to helping our clients transform their businesses for lasting competitive advantage.  We have a unique set of assets to enable this transformation ranging from brand monitoring and social CRM through SM Research (and hybrid research combining SM research with other streams of data from Nielsen) and finally the capabilities of the NM Incite/McKinsey team to enable business transformation.

My thanks to everyone I have worked with over the last 4 years (8 years, really) working in this business – I’m sure out paths will cross again soon. 

(Yes, the title let me use the only good picture of me windsurfing!)

Tom O’Brien
@tomob

We measure advocacy, which is the number of people recommending a brand above any others, and have seen strong relationships between the metric and sales in a number of categories including automotive, cellular, CPG, pharma and others.  The underlying concept is similar to NPS – namely that if people are recommending your brand to others, that you will be better off than if they are NOT recommending your brand.

Here is where it is different from NPS.  We are observing naturally occurring recommendations.  There is no suggestion, no survey, no artifice.  People are either recommending your brand to others or they aren’t.  We have tested this extensively (working with a team at Northwestern’s Kellogg School) to validate the correlations between change in advocacy and change in sales or market share.

Example below from the luxury car category showing the correlation between changes in advocacy and changes in share for BMW.

While the scales are different we can see the positive correlation in advocacy and luxury market share for BMW. Looking at the scatter plot and doing the regression confirms the relationship and it’s statistical significance with a p-value of 5% (we’re 95% confident that there is a positive correlation between advocacy and luxury market share). 

Given the complexity of the automotive category and the economic conditions in this time frame it’s amazing that a single factor model can so nicely line up.  With an understanding of incentives to dealers/buyers, advertising spend and supply issues I’m certain the model could be improved but at the end of the day we’re validating that social media does matter. 

Social media clearly has an impact on sales in this category and others.  Many times the relationship will not be this clear or the category may be so complex that a single variable model cannot tease out the results or there could be errors in the metric (source spam/problems, bad language model, etc…)  but if you believe in the 3 tenets, it’s not surprising and quite intuitive that there should be a link between a social media metric and sales.

Of course, to change advocacy you need to know what drives it – but we do that part too!  We have an underlying analytic model to understand in detail what drives advocacy for any category, brand or competitive set.

@tomob

As I’ve worked the last 7 years in building metrics and tools to help companies understand the reasons why people do what they do, 3 facts have become evident:

1) Pretty much everyone is online

2) Online communities are reflective of or an enhancement to traditional social relationships

3) People I know are the best source of product recommendations

The digital trails consumer conversations leave online are a good approximation for the world at large.  The latest pew Internet research report show online population reaching  79% of all Americans.  Furthermore, rather than asking people questions about what they think, we can just observe what they say.  We don’t have to ask people if they do or don’t do something we can observe them.

Online communities are as real and vibrant as any other and are built around long term relationships.  Whether it’s a community like Facebook that looks like friendships I’ve developed throughout life or LinkedIn, the connections I’ve made in business, or on a forum like Rennlist, my boss’s favorite Porsche aficionado site, the community is strong and vibrant, with lots of on-going relationships that grow and fade with new people coming into ask questions from experts or lurkers that keep up with the community without contributing or the occasional visitor that just wants to see what the experts think.  These communities are strong, vibrant and have their analogs in social situations in the offline world.

The impact of person to person recommendations is stronger than advertising or other methods of company sponsored communications, when you want to know what car to buy you ask a car nut, when you want to know how to get the best deals on frequent flyer miles you ask a friend with a passion for travel.  Increasingly, though you’d find your friend saying “go look on flyertalk” there’s a thread for that (can I trademark “there’s a thread for that?”).  I was recently browsing flyertalk to figure out international fares for a 2 year old ( I’ve never booked a child fare before and didn’t want to get screwed) while I was there I saw a new miles promo on United it had been posted and had hundreds of comments before it even reached my inbox from United later that day.

Given that people online are pretty much everyone, the communities represent real social relationships and people I know give the most trusted recommendations we should clearly expect to see that a social media metrics measuring peoples’ recommendations to each other would be reflected in sales.

We measure advocacy, which is the number of people recommending a brand above any others, and have seen strong relationships between the metric and sales in a number of categories. (I’ll post more in the future specific to the nuts and bolts of it)

While the scales are different we can see the positive correlation in advocacy and luxury market share for BMW. Looking at the scatter plot and doing the regression confirms the relationship and it’s statistical significance with a p-value of 5% (we’re 95% confident that there is a positive correlation between advocacy and luxury market share).

Given the complexity of the automotive category and the economic conditions in this time frame it’s amazing that a single factor model can so nicely line up.  With an understanding of incentives to dealers/buyers, advertising spend and supply issues I’m certain the model could be improved but at the end of the day we’re validating that social media does matter.

Social media clearly has an impact on sales in this category and others.  Many times the relationship will not be this clear or the category may be so complex that a single variable model cannot tease out the results or there could be errors in the metric (source spam/problems, bad language model, etc…)  but if you believe in the 3 tenets, it’s not surprising and quite intuitive that there should be a link between a social media metric and sales.

In case you haven’t heard, Salesforce.com (the leading B2B Customer Relationship Management software company) bought Radian6, the leading Social Media Monitoring platform this week for $326m.   Forbes Article.

We think the deal marks an interesting inflection point in the social media age. Here is a software company that helps businesses manage their one-on-one relationships, jumping the divide to buy a company that lets brands manage one-on-one relationships. For us it is a glimpse into the possibility of the post mass media, one-on-one, world.

As Forbes imagines:

“Say a consumer tweets that she hates her cell phone service provider (I name no names). This is what a Radian6-Chatter-Salesforce.com combo could do, Kingstone says:

First the company would actually know that the tweet was sent. It would then decide whether to reach out to the customer or wait to hear from her or dismiss her entirely. The response will be dependent upon whether or not she is an “influencer” and, hopefully, has a legitimate gripe.
If it does decide to respond, it will then use the platform to decide what is the right response to make her happy.

Only bits and pieces of this is possible today and usually after a massive investment or internal realignment. Getting to this point won’t necessarily be easy, Kingstone also says. “It will take an integration of Radian6′s listening platform, with Chatter and with Salesforce.com’s 360 degree view of the customer. But it is feasible.”"
Nobody really knows what this purchase will mean for the future. But if you are in the social business it is worth keeping in the corner of your eye.

Cheers,

David
@rabjohns

11 years ago, the Cluetrain Manifesto (the end of business as usual) was published.  The only really surprising thing about it (looking back) is that the predictions didn’t happen faster.  Well, I guess it is surprising in another dimension.  The challenges to the modern business corporation were articulated, but it is clear now these same challenges apply to all large hierarchical organizations including governments, political parties, news organizations, etc.  This article is focused on:

Thesis #6: The Internet is enabling conversations among human beings that were simply not possible in the era of mass media.

Thesis #7: Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy.

Here are four examples of how people are  connecting to each other across the boundaries of time, space & institutional hierarchy using the Internet to subvert authority and established channels of communication..

WikiLeaks: Think what you will of Julian Assange – but he has certainly used the power of the web to attack powerful institutions.  His 2006 essay posits that organizations (like governments) can only gather and hold power IF they are able to keep secrets.  As soon as they can’t keep secrets they will be crippled and doomed.  He has recently acted on this hypothesis in a direct attack on the US Government.  The publication of these materials (by the NYT, Guardian, LeMonde, Der Speigel and El Pais)  certainly made a bigger impact, but he could have acted without any collaboration with mass media and achieved roughly the same result.

Obama: Barak Obama was a long shot underdog early in the 2008 Presidential campaign.   His campaign did many, many things very well but in one particular area, they absolutely trounced the competition.  Obama used the Internet to organize, motivate and dramatically expand his supporters and fundraising.  He did this better that any presidential campaign ever has – and it paid off.

NYT:  How Obama Tapped Into Social Network’s Power.
Wired Magazine:  Obama’s Secret Weapon – Internet, Databases, Psychology.

Tea Party: Of course Obama and the Democrats don’t have a monopoly on using the Internet to subvert the established order.  In the 2010 mid-term elections, the Tea Party used the power of the web to connect a widely distributed group of people who shared distrust of the established political parties – especially Republicans.

The Atlantic:  How the Tea Party Used the Internet to Defeat* The First Internet President

Ford: Ford Motor Company won AdAge 2010 Marketer of the Year accolades for among other reasons being the most aggressive car company on the planet when it comes to using social networks to sell cars.   Ford didn’t fight about whether marketing or public relations owned this channel – instead they collapsed the two into a single communications function.  For two examples of how Ford is reducing their media spending dramatically while reaching ever more people – see below:

Wired Magazine:  Ford Bets the Fiesta on Social Networking
USA Today:  New Ford Explorer to make debut on Facebook

These four examples demonstrate how powerful a force the Internet has become in society – not just for corporations, but also for all large institutions.  We live in an age of disintermediation where each of us can get our information from any source we like and no longer have to accept anyone or anything as the “expert” or the final authority.  There will be much more painful change ahead (mostly for large organizations) as people band together in their own interests.  The smartest of those large organizations will understand the implications of these trends and figure out how to get on the side of the people.

Tom O’Brien
@tomob

There are lots of ways of looking at historical buzz and being smart after the fact but we thought it would be interesting to create an algorithm that didn’t just look at buzz but looked at momentum, exaggerating the effect of growth visually.  After playing for a while, a new tool was born that we christened “ThemeSteam”,  A tool that indeed could have predicted the Ice Tea Vodka Craze.  ThemeStream is now a tool that we use almost daily to see what is hot in the categories we care about.

ThemeStream determines the words most correlated with the category conversations for each period and then highlights (through exponential comparison of deviation from the average value) those words that are most dynamic.  This allows us to see emerging, waning, and seasonal trends.

For example recently a client was interested in seeing the impact of Jamie Oliver on the food conversation among parents.  Here is the chart.

Source: Data comes from looking at a combination of food and parenting datasets focused on discussion of kids lunches N=10,995

In this chart we see when the impact of Jamie Oliver begun to have an effect on moms’ lunch decisions and discussions as he is putting focus on nutrition education out-of-home.  Note that we see the Jamie Oliver conversations growing rapidly as soon as the show – Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution begins to air.

This was flagged as a issue for our client well before they would otherwise have been paying attention to it.  We are using this new tool for early trend identification across many projects from food to pharma to consumer electronics.

Tom O’Brien
@tomob

I am pleased to announce that the second of these two – Zachary Nippert is joining the MotiveQuest team as our new Director, Client Relationships based out of our New York office. In this role Zack will take over responsibility for managing relationships and service delivery with key MotiveQuest Clients on the east coast including Citi, Novartis and others.

Zack joins MotiveQuest from DDB where he was most recently part of the new business pursuit team. Prior to that Zack was an Account Supervisor with DDB with prior experience at DraftFCB and Leo Burnett. In those roles he developed significant experience in client management, brand marketing and using research to help his clients solve complex business problems.

His background as a recovering Mad Man makes Zack a great addition to the MotiveQuest team – and I’m sure the tenaciousness he learned as a goalie for the Cincinnati Cyclones will serve him – and his clients well – it’s great to have him on board.

TO’B

Carter joins MotiveQuest from JD Power’s Web Intelligence division where he was Senior Manager, Consumer Insight & Strategy. Carter has 3+ years of experience using social media research to help clients solve business problems, and took increasingly responsibility for organizational development and client management over his time at JDP. Prior to JD Power he worked for Greenhouse Partners a Denver based brand strategy firm.

His experience in social media research, brand strategy and client relationships make Carter an excellent addition to the MotiveQuest team and we are honored to have him aboard.  (In the photo above Carter is enjoying “truckstop meatloaf” on his first MQ road trip!)

TO’B

And Part 2

Enjoy – TO’B

Public Relations Firm to Settle FTC Charges that It Advertised Clients’ Gaming Apps Through Misleading Online Endorsements

In this case the agency was hiring people to pose as consumers on the web and post positive reviews about its client’s products.

Glad to see that the FTC is on it – but I think this is a much more widespread problem that just this one agency.

This kind of behavior really bugs me because it has the long-term potential of poisoning the Social Media well. How much of this kind of astroturfing can go on before consumers stop trusting what they are reading? Do we (marketers) really want SM to become the next “email” or “telemarketing” where a bunch of spammers ruin the channel for everyone? I don’t think so.

Social Media (as a channel) is a great place for companies to engage with consumers – but it is not a great place for direct advertising and promotion. If you want to be effective here you have to behave in helpful, human and humble ways. It is not just about selling the next thing.

TO’B