Posts Tagged ‘Digital Strategy’
Monday, May 10th, 2010
Information Overload; Tool Overload; Platform Overload; System Overload.
The nature of social media is different from the media of old. Inherently, the sheer amount of information present out there dwarfs what a normal human being can possibly digest on a daily basis. While information has been increasing, human capacity to process this information has not grown significantly with it. Marketers, PR and other social media professionals grapple with the reality that they have to fight for attention on a daily basis just to register in peoples’ minds.
Tools and applications were then designed to help to cope with the mountains of data in social media. There are countless applications being developed out there on the web. Which are the necessary ones? The ones that improve productivity? The ones that improve connectivity? There should be some stringent criteria to determine if an application is worth its salt. One cannot be switching to a new tool that does “everything but clean the kitchen sink”, each time developers release a new application/tool. Let’s not even go into how many different social media platforms there are out there, or even the aggregators that try to combine all the streams of information into one centralized place.
Powerful features, but how many are used?
Social media also has a largely DIY nature so far. It hardly makes sense to have a tool so complex that it cannot be easily adopted – social media evolves so quickly, that a platform/tool could very well have evolved if one does not catch up. People will vote with their feet and hop off to the next platform or tool that serves their needs better.
Tools will always exist, and change quickly. One may be inundated with all the quirky features offered by a tool/platform, but only use a few main ones after a while (really). Most important is that what you’re using helps you achieve your aims.
Sometimes, you may have to go where the crowd goes. Community platforms that currently form the social media landscape and have a gained significant traction include main players such as Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Flickr, just to name a few. Newer ones to watch might include Foursquare and the recently released Google Buzz.
At the end of the day, it is important to understand the aim and purpose that one has:
- Measuring social media ROI?
- Establishing thought leadership in your field?
- Collecting data on what people are saying about your organization/brand? For market research? For immediate PR responses?
- Having a new channel to be able to communicate with your stakeholders, for promotions, WOM campaigns?
- Doing it just because your competitors are? (what does this say about your strategy?)
Regardless of which tools one chooses to use, as long as the aims are achieved, a campaign/initiative can be considered successful.
It’s not about the tools. It’s about the people. People can make sense of the data and situation, technology is simply an enabler to better that process.
This is not a new line of thought, but one that has been discussed even years ago. Ending off with this quote-worthy paragraph:
“The thing is about the new technologies is not that they provide new, more efficient – better targeted or more relevant – messaging opportunities for businesses to exploit, but rather that it connects people to each other and that allows us to see each other (which you will hopefully remember allows us to emulate and thus drives the spread of behaviors and ideas).”
Tags: Digital Strategy, Insights, Social Media, social media intelligence, Social Media Monitoring
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Tuesday, March 30th, 2010
In the realm of corporate branding, you would be hard-pressed to not admit that communicators within an organization have lost a great deal of control when it comes to shaping an organization’s brand image. The main culprit of this is the crossing of social media over the past couple of years from being just a niche activity to gaining a more homogeneous acceptance amongst the common Internet user. It has stamped its mark on molding public opinion and perception through platform giants such as Facebook and Twitter, and, much to the chagrin of brand managers, a good bulk of this shaping of corporate identity has fallen outside their locus of control.
So what has changed? If we take a look at some of the key trends with regards to how brands used to connect with the consumer, taking pre-2008 as the line just before social media crossed over in terms of adoption, we can see how this shift has slowly but surely taken place. Splitting this shift into two sections, namely external branding i.e. communicating the brand and content to the consumer, and internal branding i.e. brand creation and management, we get a sense of just how pervasive the effect of social media has been today on a company’s branding efforts.
Prior to 2008, brands went through the media for content creation and distribution, and weren’t actually creators themselves. Going along this vein, they also didn’t directly connect with their consumers directly, but rather, utilized “eyeballs” from publishers to get access to their desired audience. This was the typical external branding strategy before the social media machine kicked in. Now that usage of social media platforms is rampant, brands are looking more to engage and build relationships directly with their consumers, and also to utilize these platforms to create and distribute content themselves. From an internal branding perspective, brands used to have a great deal of control in dictating the brand persona and its consistency, but this new shift has caused somewhat of a loss of control, given that the vastness of the social media universe far outweighs the reach of even the biggest brands, and they end up playing catch up instead of dictating the pace with the onset of user-generated content.
In this seemingly-chaotic mess that has now been created, brands need to accept the fact that this new idea of corporate branding is a symbiotic relationship that exists not in the wrestling of control for creative dominance, but a compromise between the two parties that may amplify a company’s brand far further than they originally may have been able to do on their own. Given the choice of technology out there, some of the steps brands can take to gain a foothold in this volatile world are:
- Developing a comprehensive reputation management system that allows for tracking and gauging of a brand’s influence across various platforms
- Keeping a close watch on channel partners and their projection of your brand, as well as the community that dwell within that channel and how they respond to your brand
- Creating a “buddy” system between volunteer brand advocates and people who are new to your brand and using that as an early feedback system for any potential problems
Tags: Branding, Digital Strategy, Social Media
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Wednesday, May 13th, 2009
Today’s announcement of our partnership with Edelman is a huge endorsement of the importance of social media in the eyes of marketers.
Why Edelman? We believe Edelman’s push and continuous focus in social media complete that loop which clients look for a successful social media campaign.
My discussions with Edelman’s John Kerr and his colleagues have provided me with the confidence that the PR agency is very well-aware of the importance of social media to their clients. Our partnership will only increase the confidence of clients to address the social media scene which in turn improves consumer confidence in the brand.
Why is this so?
In any PR or marketing campaign, research plays a very important role in laying the foundation in achieving its objectives and goals.
There is no difference in a social media campaign.
For example, in traditional PR, the PR consultant would have to do research on the right media and for journalists to target to achieve clients’ PR objectives.
Hence, it is important for a PR consultant to identify the right channels and influencers for a social media campaign to achieve more predictable results for the client. This provides the client with more confidence in the success of the online campaign.
Research in social media is different because of the vast amount of data that a PR consultant would have to go through and organize to explain the data to the client.
Brandtology’s services, powered by our Digital Conversation Management System or DCMS, that we are providing Edelman will allow Edelman’s PR consultants to focus on what they do best: the consultancy service to their clients.
Beside research, Brandtology will also provide Edelman with real time analysis of what is being said of their clients in real time to ensure that their clients are well presented in the social media space.
Furthermore, the buzz cluster technology that Brandtology has included in the dashboard allows Edelman‘s clients to adopt a bottom-up marketing approach in which the campaign is by the consumer, for the consumer and with the consumer.
In all, this partnership isn’t just about Brandtology and Edelman, it also highlights the important role consumers play in the success of a brand.
Eddie Chau
Founder & CEO
Tags: Corporate, Digital Strategy, Insights, Marketing, PR, Reports, Social Media Monitoring
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Tuesday, March 24th, 2009
Following on from my previous post that introduced some of DCMS’s capabilities; in this post I want to showcase the analytical capabilities that it provides. Let’s revisit our Singapore Mobile Phones example and focus on the Google Phone for the first two weeks of March 2009.
Let’s imagine that I want to study the chatter for Google phone. First thing on my mind would be, how is its buzz and sentiment? The Story Line chart in DCMS provides an overlay of two charts; the buzz and the sentiment. You can see this in the chart below, where the bars are associated with the axis on the left and the sentiment line is associated with the axis on the right. With sentiments the DCMS scores it in the range from -100 (most negative) to 100 (most positive). For this two week period, there is a slight decrease in the buzz towards the end with slightly negative sentiments.
The next two charts below reflect the trend of both the buzz and the sentiment. Here we are displaying the actual values and the 10-days moving average. In both cases, you can observe that the trend is moving towards less buzz and becoming more negative.
Next thing on my mind now, is to compare against other brands. How does the Google Phone compare with Apple iPhone, Nokia and Samsung? The charts below plot comparisons between Google Phone, Apple iPhone, Nokia and Samsung; one for buzz and the other for sentiments. This is very useful to make intuitive comparisons.
The above charts show separate features that are based on buzz and sentiments but we have several properties such as influence, sentiment and buzz. What about combining them? Now, based on all these three properties, how does Google Phone compare against the others? The next chart below is what we call the Social Media Equity Chart. It uses the three mentioned properties and lays it on the chart to give you and intuitive indication of where your product/brand stand. Where you want your product/brand to be, is on the top right as possible with the biggest bubble. This is because, moving upwards give you an indication that more influential people are making posts, moving right gives you an indication that posts are more positive and the size of the bubble is indicative of more buzz.
So far, I’ve mentioned mostly about buzz and sentiment, making comparisons and the like. Now, what if I want to do some advertising on a forum. Where should I put it? And ensure that its the most relevant. In DCMS with have a chart that shows you the top 10 buzziest channels. This is illustrated below. Not only do we show you the buzz but also the sentiment of the buzz in that individual channel. This will allow you to find suitable target channels to advertise where there is more chatter, at the same time you have an indication if the forumers are for or against you.
To further aid the case of advertising at the right channel. The chart on top 10 channels with the most number of unique voices would come in very handy. This chart will indicate to you the number of forumers that have generated your buzz. The difference here is that we are talking about the unique voice/person. So you have an indication that you can reach that estimated number of voices within the channel if you choose to advertise there.
While we are on the topic of voices, what if you want to know specifically who are making up your buzz count; voices that are making posts about your product/brand. This information is also available in DCMS. The data grid below shows you how you can uniquely identify the voice, his influence, as an author or commenter, the channel he is found, the number of posts, on average his sentiment and also list out all his posts that was made.
In addition to all the charting capabilities, DCMS offers a lot of transparency to the information that is used. In almost all of our charts, you can go right down to the posts that was used, to even the actual details of the posts that includes the thread for context. With every post, we also include a reference to the original source with a URL link.
In summary, I’ve gone through several of the analytic features that DCMS have to offer. I hope it gives you a much better insight into how it can aid in your analytical processes. If you have any further question, always feel free to drop me a note or leave a comment. For one of my upcoming blog entries, I will do a case study on the performance of mobile phone brands in Singapore to look at how much buzz they generate and how’s their online sentiment like.
Stay tuned for more.
Cheers!
Dr. Alvin Chan
Co-Founder and Vice President for R&D
Tags: Competitor Intelligence, Corporate, DCMS, Digital Strategy, Reports, Sentiments, Social Media Monitoring
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Saturday, March 21st, 2009
Ever used the Internet to do your research for making your next purchase? I would say most of us do. It could either be looking for a new phone or checking out what the latest gadgets have to offer. This is just two of the typical scenarios that as consumers is where we would normally want more information. The question then, is how do we look for for it? There is typically, Google Search of course! Yes, most of us would just rely on Google’s returned results and start from there. For the more hardcore folks, there are known forums that contain enthusiastic forumers that will do reviews, share complaints, questions and answers and so on. These forums offer a lot more insight into various good as well as the bad from real users.
From a company’s perspective, wouldn’t you want to know where all this information is residing? You would want to protect your brand or get some immediate feedback on your product. Wouldn’t you want to know if your investment in all that marketing and advertising paid off? To do so, you would probably need to go through the same process of finding the information manually, using search engines or browsing through known forums. This will take a lot of time and effort, and I mean a lot! To consolidate all the information manually will become very tedious and cumbersome; not to mention how often you do it to ensure that everything is up to date? It will be an uphill task without help.
Now, allow me to demonstrate how Brandtology’s Digital Conversation Management System (DCMS) can help. Let’s look at a scenario where as a corporate personnel of company ABC and I’m interested to gauge the online buzz/chatter for the Google phone in the Singapore. For illustration purposes, in this example I’ve identified over 80 channels in Singapore that relates to the mobile phone industry, where their sites include: ChannelNewsAsia, GameAxis, Hardwarezone Forum, SGClub, SgForums, SingaporeBikes, Stomp, Electric Newpaper, VR-Zone and YoungNTUC.
Focusing on the month of February 2009, the chart from DCMS below illustrates an overview of the various subjects that I am looking at. Apple iPhone came up top with the highest buzz at 1796 posts and Nokia in second at about 568 posts with Google Phone at 514 posts. The colors in the chart depict the sentiment ratings, for example with Google Phone, it had 218 very positive, 30 positive, 213 neutral, 11 negative and 42 very negative posts. (Light Green = Very Positive, Dark Green = Positive, Blue = Neutral, Orange = Negative and Red = Very Negative).
Next, we would want to know generally what is the online chatter about. With our focus on Google Phone, from the Buzz Cluster in DCMS we observe the following.
The green colors reflect a positive sentiment towards those phrases mentioned. Light green represents very positive and the darker green represents positive. The size of the font represents the frequency; the bigger the font the more frequent its being mentioned. Some of the key phrases give you clues into the posts. For example “SingTel HTC Dream”, “Better than iPhone”, etc.
Next, let’s look at the Buzz in February for the Google Phone. A reference point to note here is that Channel News Asia featured an article that SingTel was bringing the Google Phone to Singapore on the 20th Feb. It is obvious that the chatter or buzz on the online media space has increased on the 20th and hit a high of 47 for the 21st Feb. This shows a correlation between the announcement and sparking off interest amongst the online forumers. The benefit of this Buzz chart is that you can use it to gauge if an event or announcement is successful at generating buzz amongst online media users.
The ability to determine the buzz only gives you an overall picture in its totality. That may be enough for some, but what if you want to drill down into its details? The next chart below illustrates how DCMS can breakdown where the buzz come from. From here you can see that the channel with the most buzz is from Hardwarezone’s forum “Smart PDA, PDA phones and GPS SIG” followed by “Eat Drink Man Women”. The intelligence you get here can be used for targeted advertising; choosing the channels that has the most relevant buzz.
So far, I’ve mentioned about buzz, how about the number of bloggers/forumers? You may have a lot of buzz, but it could just be from one or two bloggers. At times, you may want to know the number of unique bloggers that have mentioned your product or brand. This is where you can gauge the “viral growth” or spread in online media. The diagram below is DCMS’s Voice Growth chart. It shows the number of unique new voices for each day and the cumulative number of voices over the February time period. Like the Buzz chart, you can see that there was a significant number of new voices that grew from the 20th to the 22th after the announcement from SingTel on the 20th. If the announcement was actually a promotional event, this is a very good indicator to determine its success in spreading the word.
In summary, I’ve shown you briefly several features of DCMS’s capabilities and I hope it gives you an insight on how it can help you. For my next blog entry I’ll demonstrate further its analytical capabilities and how it provides transparency in the online media information we gather.
Stay tuned for more updates.
Cheers!
Dr. Alvin Chan
Co-Founder and Vice President for R&D
Tags: Buzz, Channels, Corporate, DCMS, Digital Strategy, Reports, Sentiments, Social Media Monitoring
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