Social media monitoring has significantly changed the way brands and marketers leverage social media for business. The constant stream of mentions on sites like Facebook, Twitter and blogs provide a great way for companies to monitor their brands, products, and consumers in social media. While monitoring has been useful primarily in customer service and buzz-tracking, there is far more value to be realized.  Enter the age of social media intelligence.

What is social media intelligence?

Social media intelligence is the combination of quantitative and qualitative insights gained from monitoring a specific brand, product, or subject matter in social media.  All in real-time.

How can social media intelligence benefit my business?

Social media is the world’s largest focus group with millions of participants sharing their unbiased thoughts each day. With this massive data set, businesses now have the power to mine and further understand consumer opinion and slice and dice data by gender, age segmentation and location.  Here are 5 specific case studies on social media intelligence:

Applebee’s Restaurants – Campaign (in)Effectiveness

Seven (7) days after the launch of Applebee’s ‘Real Burgers’ national TV ad campaign in March 2009, the campaign was really striking a cord with consumers. The only problem was that we saw it was overwhelmingly negative (80%) with most wondering ‘What were they serving us before?’  Applebee’s ended up running the campaign for 4 months too long.  Imagine the money saved and harm avoided if they had learned that it was bombing sooner.   Their competitor, with our help, knew all of this as it unfolded, whoops.

Membership Association – Why are members canceling?

A national membership association was seeing a sharp increase in membership cancellations over a 3 month period.   Through social media intelligence they learned they had a material age segmentation issue: the organization’s stance on key political issues and a changing membership demographic was making a segment of members very unhappy.  The association segmented their member-base into three distinct buckets and now speaks to each segment with a unique voice.

Soft Drink Company – New Product Launch

With the launch of a new soft drink in 2009, a soft drink company saw that young men loved the the new product while women had mixed opinions.  Through social media intelligence the company quickly learned that older women were taking offense to the TV ad creative, not the product (the taste was great).  The soft drink company replaced the creative to better reach its female target.

Major Restaurant Chain – Location-based Issues

In September 2009, a restaurant client saw  ‘tough meat’ being discussed by its guests in social media.  Through geo-location, we helped the restaurant chain learn that the issues were regional in nature and all specific to the northwest US.  The client traced the problem back to a regional meat purveyor who had outsourced to a third party.  This issue was resolved within 3 business days.

Cable TV Network – Rapid Consumer Insights

In TV and Entertainment, learning what viewers think of programming is critical to success.  In Q2 2010, a cable TV network aired its hit show’s season finale on a Friday, by Monday we delivered the network intelligence on what viewers thought of the finale, the show’s entire season, and reported on 100’s of fan suggested story-lines for next season.

Social Media Intelligence Empowers Decision-making

Social media intelligence gives actionable insights into business and detailed and segmented information about consumers.  If your organization wants to understand questions like “why teenagers choose a competitor product, or how females in the northeast US feel about your service”, contact us.   We deliver the intelligence.

The list of social media monitoring tools gets longer everyday. Each tool offers something different. There are lots of bells and whistles that separate the free from premium, things like sentiment and influence analysis, workflow and demographics. But regardless of the tool, tools provide data – not answers.  A tool alone is not enough.

1. Technology is only part of the equation
   A monitoring tool requires human interpretation. No matter how cool the technology, a tool provides data (for you to dig into), not insight into what the data means or what to do with it.
2. Social Media Monitoring probably isn’t your core competency
   Social media monitoring is both art and science.  Experience is everything.  Much like SEM and SEO, listening requires skill and in-depth knowledge of technology and linguistics.  For this reason you’re probably not executing SEM & SEO campaigns in-house, you’ve outsourced them to the experts.  Social media monitoring is no different, it’s complicated and it’s time-consuming.
3. Social media monitoring is cool, but first establish why you want to listen
   Sure people are talking about your product or service, but what are you ‘listening’ for?  Is it to track a campaign? Learn more about a competitor? Measure a new product launch?  Data in of itself doesn’t deliver better business decisions.
4. Tools offer promises, not deliverables
   Insights, intelligence, action and ROI are the promises of tools, not the deliverables.  Expert people are needed to turn these promises into deliverables.
5. Real-time insights drive the ROI
   More timely, insightful information makes for better decision making.  Better decision making is what drives ROI.
6. Answers are everything
   Ask a social media monitoring tool to answer a question…

Social media intelligence is the combination of social media monitoring technology and expert insight delivery.  It includes dashboards, reports to answer tough questions, and expert services to better understand what the data means and (most importantly) what to do with the data.   You’re able to answer questions like: Is our ad campaign working? What do people think of our new spokesperson? Why do teens choose our competitor? How do we increase enrollment?

If you’ve already tried a DIY monitoring tool and want to take the next step in gathering intelligence, we can help.  Contact us and we’ll show you how social media intelligence transforms business.

For the restaurant industry, knowing what guests are saying about your brand is the probably the single most important aspect of your business these days. After the Domino’s PR nightmare last year, many restaurants and food service institutions are really starting to look harder at what is being said about their brand online externally AND internally.

People are talking about Restaurants online – and not only in Twitter.

As you can see, there’s A LOT of people talking about restaurants. There are both threats and opportunities within those mentions as well as an amazing amount of market research, competitive intelligence and so much more.

What are your guests talking about in social media?

You’d be surprised at what people jump to their mobile devices to tweet about. Everything from food, service, decor, parking, and even music is fair game. Let’s take a look at few mentions of unlucky brands, who we won’t name:

This is what your guests are talking about, and if you don’t know by know, others are listening. If someone sees this tweet who do you think they will choose when facing 2 restaurants next to each other? If you guessed the one not related to vomit, you’re probably right.

Some of the benefits of monitoring social media for restaurants include:

• Brand Monitoring – Listening to what people are saying about your brand overall
• Customer Service – Finding guest problems and offering a resolution can go a long way in improving retention
• Market Research – See what guests think about your products from the world’s largest focus group… the Web.
• Competitive Intelligence – Know more about your competitors than they often know about themselves.  Monitor consumer feedback on their latest TV/radio campaigns, monitor what menu items people like/dislike, and identify the venues where people are talking and make sure you’re also in the conversation.
• Promotion Tracking – Promotions hit the web fast. You can see if a promotion is working (or not) faster than ever before.  Gain insight into whether to keep the promotion going or abort.
• Employee Chatter – Knowing what employees are doing (or saying) can save you a ton of bad press. See Domino’s example again.

Whether your interest is in customer service or product development, start listening to what people are saying in social media and you’ll be ever closer to your guests.

Content noise in social media monitoring is undoubtedly the biggest challenge facing most brands. Whether your company is monitoring your brand, product, or a competitor or two, getting a “clear signal” within the social media sphere is a critical first step.

Getting rid of noise in social media is an art and a science

In social media, a term like “HP” is used to describe a number of subjects aside from Hewlett Packard, more often automotive “horsepower” and the book/movie/toy “Harry Potter.”  So if you’re trying to listen for HP computers but you keep getting false-positive mentions about cars and teenage wizardry, you’re not alone. It takes a lot more than a simple boolean search and a list of word exclusions to get rid of the noise that has nothing to do with the subject you want.  When setting up a search, it’s important to combine brand phrases along with product concepts and product attributes that can help the system to identify relevant mentions.  Yes, this can be a painstaking manual process with literally 100’s of keyword inclusions and compounded keyword inclusions, but is usually required to filter out the noise.

We took a different path and developed some pretty slick technology that uses semantic filtering to get rid of the noise, so it does the filtering automatically, neat.   All brands have their unique social media monitoring challenges, “HP” being one, I’d love to hear about other brands with these heavy noise problems too…

When it comes to social media, determining sentiment isn’t as clean and straightforward as it is in a journal or newspaper. In social media people write like they speak. This means heavy uses of slang, shorthand sentences and words, poor grammar, idioms, and industry/brand/regional specific dialect.  There is a big difference between automated Generic Sentiment analysis and Adaptive Sentiment™ analysis and how it relates to Social Media Monitoring.

Generic Sentiment Analysis

Almost every 1st Generation Social Media Monitoring tool uses generic sentiment analysis algorithms with a majority using the same outsourced technology company to do so. This technology is based on understanding sentiment from proper sentence structures from a textbook or newspaper article. If it says “good, delicious, fast” it’s going to be positive. If it says “gross, disgusting, sick, slow”, it’s going to be negative.  Generic Sentiment analysis is an approach that just doesn’t lend itself to social media and all of its informal communications and industry contexts.  Because of the language nuances and industry contexts, Generic Sentiment analysis typically produces accuracy results in the 50%-65% range, sometime much lower depending on the industry topic.  That’s “flip of the coin” accuracy.

Adaptive Sentiment™ Analysis

Our product, RESONATE, uses automated Adaptive Sentiment™.  Adaptive Sentiment is our patent pending technology that incorporates machine-learning and human feedback to fine-tune sentiment algorithms and continuously LEARN the unique language of your brand or product within social media.  The language and medium for every brand is different, which means the words that mean positive, neutral, or negative will also be different.

Examples:

For an electronics manufacturer, a product seen as “Sick”, “Nuts”, “Dope”, “Crazy”, or even “The Bomb” is a good thing, it’s positive.  Using Generic Sentiment, these words are typically an indication of something very wrong, but it depends on the context and industry.  Context and meaning changes from product to product, brand to brand, and industry to industry. Another example from one of our clients, the words “nom nom nom” are meaningless, unless they’re used in the food industry, where “nom nom nom” means “delicious.” Generic off-the-shelf sentiment analysis would score this typically as a neutral comment.

What does this mean for your brand?

If you’re running a social media monitoring campaign it’s critical to ACCURATELY know what people are saying about your brand, market and competitors.  Adaptive Sentiment technology LEARNS your brand and the unique language used by your consumers.  It learns that “nom, nom, nom” is good if you’re in the food industry, and “leaking” is bad if you’re in the plastic bag industry. Your brand is accurately measured and the algorithms constantly fine-tune themselves with human feedback as opposed to the generic model which simply runs a basic sentiment algorithm and never learns.  Because of its continuous learning intelligence, Adaptive Sentiment delivers sentiment accuracy in the 90% range vs 50%-65% for Generic Sentiment.

At ListenLogic, we service each client with a dedicated analyst that custom builds your Adaptive Sentiment models and provides daily optimization of your account to deliver highly accurate brand sentiment in real-time.  We help your organization identify new threats and opportunities each business day. Social media monitoring is a powerful way to gain insight into your business, but if the information you’re receiving isn’t accurate you’re wasting the effort.

See it for yourself

If you’d like to take a demo and see how our enterprise listening solution can better serve your brand or clients, contact us today and request a demo.

Social media monitoring is one of the most discussed topics in social media marketing these days, and with good reason. It is still a new industry and there are a lot of different things to look for. If you have a brand or sell products, you NEED to know what people are saying in social media. If you aren’t, you’re leaving your brand in the hands of consumers and one bad experience could turn into a PR nightmare.

So you’re ready to listen, now you need a plan. Of course it’s different for every brand, but this as a general step-by-step guideline for a solid social media monitoring strategy.

Step 1: Determine WHAT you want to listen for

Do you want to listen for just your brand, or do you want to listen for specific products? Should you be listening to what is being said about your competitors? Are you looking to develop leads or compile market research? These are the questions that you need to think about to get a better of idea of what you should be listening to. With so much chatter out there on the web, it’s important to know what you’re looking for before you hit step 2.

Step 2: Start Listening

Now that you know what to listen for, it’s time to start listening. How to listen depends on your needs. Our Resonate platform provides a full-service solution for social media monitoring combining cutting-edge technology with a dedicated industry analyst. We manage social media listening for you.

Step 3: Analyze the Data

Depending on what you’re listening for, you can have 100 mentions a week, or 10,000 mentions a week, either way you’ll need to be able to analyze the data and know what people are really saying and this is where advanced tools are required. In order to analyze social media, you need to know whether mentions are relevant to your brand, whether the sentiment is positive or negative, and what the relative influence level is for each social media posting . While looking at data you’ll see some things that you’ll likely want to respond to, and that takes us to step 4.

Step 4: Get Involved in the Conversation

If people are complaining about your brand there’s no better way to find out how you can help. This is where real-time social media monitoring is important, you can respond on the fly as soon as it happens. If your customer had a bad experience, simply reach out to them and offer to help. A recent study shows that a majority of consumers APPROVE of being responded to by the companies they are talking about. If you don’t already have an established social media presence, this would be a great time to get started. Showing that your company cares about its customers goes a long way.

Step 5: Use the Data to Make Smarter Business Decisions

Social media monitoring isn’t just to see what people are saying about your brand, it’s also to see what people are saying about your competitors. Use social media monitoring as a complete market research tool. Social media is the world’s largest focus group, just start listening. You may learn that people hate your latest product, or they just really loved the old design or packaging. You can use the data in all parts of your organization to improve performance in customer service, marketing, human resources, design & development, etc.

BTW, if you’re still using Google Reader, or RSS feeds to track the mentions of your brand, it’s really time to upgrade. Hopefully these 5 steps will give you something to think about when planning your social media strategy – just remember to adapt accordingly to your brand.

A study released by EXPO, showed that moms as consumers are 12x more likely to trust a consumer review of a product than any promotional materials or marketing messages. (View the full article @ emarketer.com)

What does this tell us? This says that times are changing and what PEOPLE are saying about your brand is just as, if not MORE important than what you are saying about it. With consumer TRUST now in the hands of consumers themselves, it’s time for brands to start listening and responding to what their customers want.

Are you listening to your customers? Do you know what they’re saying about your brand? We can help you listen, contact us today.

ListenLogic CEO Mark Langsfeld talks Social Media Monitoring on BlogTalkRadio. Find the discussion and check out the full post over at Cliqology.

Rudy Wolfs, chief information officer at ING Direct Bank, looks online and sees “a growing fire hose of information flying at us” from the American public. Brands and products uplifted and defiled by a chorus of millions, every day, on Twitter, Facebook, blog posts, comment boards. Instant feedback between friends? Corporate America wants to see it, own it, exploit it. But first, it’s got to be pulled from the vast unwieldy pile.

Dutch-owned, Wilmington-based ING Direct Bank controls $90 billion in U.S. home loans and investments. But try Googling for posts that name “ING.” They’re everywhere. To sort and rank what people say about the bank and its rivals, Wolfs hired ListenLogic. The firm’s 10 Fort Washington-based analysts and five-member Milpitas, Calif., computing staff boast that they can track every public post that links “ING” with “account” or “mortgage” and other brand and bankerly terms, and useful verbs and references and contexts, filtering out the crushing crowd of “false positives.” Then it ranks the actual ING posts and sends them to ING staff, grouped, and graphed, and color-coded – green for positive mentions, red for complaints, customized per request. “We also use it for security. If there’s consumers talking about frauds or issues of security related to our competitors or ourselves, we want to know about it,” Wolfs told me.

ListenLogic is a small (sales below $5 million a year) and recent (2007) entry to a market that includes early movers like BuzzMetrics (now Nielsen MediaMetrics), and Umbria Inc. (now part of JD Power & Associates).

“Listening makes for rock-solid customer service,” says Mark Langsfeld, founder and chief executive officer of ListenLogic. “I can tell you about your most loved and hated products,” added Langsfeld, a former investment banker, real estate dot.com executive. “We’re looking for every public mention on Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo Finance message boards, millions of blogs, you name it. “This means no more guerrilla intelligence, talking to your competitors’ managers. No more focus groups.”

Context is key. “What does ‘Sick’ mean? It’s very positive, in snowboarding but it can very positive or very negative at a restaurant. In health care, it’s there all the time,” said ListenLogic managing partner Vincent Schiavone, who helped Langsfeld start ListenLogic after he sold his firm, spam-detector TurnTide, to Symantec Corp. for $28 million in 2004.

“Ever since online media became available 25 years ago, we’ve seen its value for concentrating the experience and knowledge of people dealing with illness,” says Bruce Grant of Digitas Health, a Philadelphia online marketing agency (owned by France’s Publicis) that serves drugmakers. Grant uses ListenLogic “for in-depth understanding of the needs and values and behaviors of people using social media.”

GSI Commerce Inc., King of Prussia, uses the service to check “what people are saying about NFL bobblehead dolls” and other products sold online by GSI customers such as the National Football League, GNC Nutrition Centers, and Bath & Body Works L.L.C., said Gerry McGoldrick, vice president of interactive marketing at GSI’sTrueAction division. “They’re great at filtering out all the noise” and targeting problems in shipping or customer service.

“Somebody big’s going to suck this company up. That’s why I invested,” Ariba Inc. founder and ex-SAP AG software sales executive Paul Melchiorre told me. The South Philly native joined Villanova professor Steve Andriole, state-funded Ben Franklin Technology Partners of Southeastern Pennsylvania, and other locals in raising $2 million to finance ListenLogic. ”This is a hot space,” Melchiorre added. “I got pulled into social networking to keep my eye on my four kids. I Facebook-friend them, I want to know who they’re with, what they’re doing.” So do companies. “This way, you can figure out what people are saying about you before you’re front-page news.” Is it unsettling that firms track your posts? If you want privacy, remember the advice Cardinal Richelieu is supposed to have given his client, the king of France:

Never write a letter. And never destroy one.