BrandsEye

Rich Data : The Competitive Edge

Marié-Louise van Zyl — 2012-05-10T09:10:07+00:00

A large number of companies are realizing that they have a promising source of revenue at their fingertips: their existing content assets. While this information is packaged as print and online media for consumers; more innovative companies are discovering additional uses for the vast amounts of unstructured information. By creating meaningful information— with charts, maps, images, and lists —companies can break this information down to help business owners make key decisions.

BrandsEye has managed to create a way of sourcing meaningful data by searching for branded mentions and using filters to draw out the specific data required. Not only is the data displayed as “what you need, when you need it”; but you could also have this data human verified by the BrandsEye crowd.

The crowd is the concept of having your data crossed checked by a number of individuals (and potential consumers) and peer verified as relevant or irrelevant, what language it is, the country it came from, and (my personal favourite) what its sentiment toward your brand is.

This represents the cornerstone of rich data; turning stand-alone pieces of data into vital, must-have information about specific audiences. In other words making information more digestible, searchable, and valuable; allowing easy segmentation and selection.

Data segmentation of data has been used for many decades to give marketers the edge by communicating to the right groups of customers. Nowadays, as the online conversation volumes grow, businesses need to be more resourceful and effective in reaching and engaging their customers, forcing them to come up with more precise techniques to segment the market.

There are many ways in which a market can be segmented and a marketer will need to decide which strategy is best suited for a given product or service. Sometimes the best option arises from combining different strategies.

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Interviewing a Digital Native

Michaella Kissack — 2012-05-10T08:15:35+00:00

"I don’t think brands can afford the luxury of ignoring social [data] these days," John Beale stated in a recent interview. As the head of strategy at Cerebra Communication, John has had years of experience with campaigns, ranging from purely traditional to the ever-increasing digital ones.

"You have to make sure you’re always reading up on what’s happening in digital; the environment changes regularly and is quite unforgiving if you don’t keep abreast of new developments." This thought leader strategises for both existing and new clients, ensuring that their objectives are being met.

As a hybrid strategist, he fulfils both a traditional and digital media role, adding, ‘I don’t think any strategist can claim isolation within their media. You need to understand how the two complement each other to really make a campaign work for the target market’.

Beale currently specialises in Social Media, as most clients’ needs in terms of strategy are for it – "Thankfully, experience, post campaign insights and direct feedback from Online Reputation Management (ORM), as well as social searches, can drive some great insights."

He added, "Social data, specifically in the form of ORM reports, is done with an emphasis on the analysis of that information. It's invaluable to the business. I don’t think there’s any quicker (or better) way to get an indication of the conversation around a product or service than listening to the conversation on social media. That data can drive key learnings and [bring about] changes to the development process internally. However, business must be willing to listen, and then act."

Beale briefly described a large cellular operator he worked previously where an in-depth ORM analysis was conducted, evidently showing that a larger customer service element was needed. Had this only been discovered months later, it would have resulted in disappointed customers and the company being far behind on delivery. The ORM analysis provided the luxury of prevention, whereas finding out later that more extensive customer service capacity was needed would’ve required an expensive cure.

Beale listed that the volume of mentions, sentiment, key nodes (conversation starter/disseminators), and categories of conversation (products/services) are the metrics that provide insight into strategy – "I think ORM insights should aid in the creation of business strategy, including the augmentation of that strategy."

Beale says that it’s important to understand what’s being said, particularly for consumer-centric brands, as well as to have an understanding of the channels used to further the conversation. "It’s all or nothing," he confirms, and because brands can’t afford to ignore social data, which allows for the management of risks and the leveraging of opportunities, brands will be taking the ‘all’ that it has to offer.

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Tutorial: How to Identify Risks and Opportunities in BrandsEye

Stacey Rumble — 2012-05-10T06:21:12+00:00

@staceyrumble

A common request from clients is how can they identify risks and opportunities from the data in their BrandsEye account? As a result I thought I’d put together another BrandsEye tutorial to make this process quite easy to learn and do as often as you need.

Once you’ve logged into your BrandsEye account, select All Mentions from the left hand panel of the Home page.

Then select the mentions you’re interested in by selecting the appropriate filters. For example:

Pull a .csv file of these mentions by selecting the green Excel icon on the top right hand corner of the left hand panel.

Opening that file will present you with an Excel spread sheet tabulating the variables of each and every mention.

Select and copy all of the text in Column A.

In your internet browser, open www.wordle.net (or your favourite word-cloud application).

Wordle is an application that generates graphics which show words appear most frequently within a body of text. The application randomises its format each time a new data-set is used. This functionality is currently not available in BrandsEye but it will be standard in Version 3 (coming out later this year) because it has proven so valuable.

You may need to adjust the graphic to be easier to read. You can do this from the tabs at the top of the word cloud, by selecting different options. Here are a few customisations I recommend:

Language: Make all words lower-case (this will remove duplicates)
Layout: Make all words horizontal
Font: Telephoto
Colour: To your preference

You might see that your brand name or your Twitter handle are the most prominent words and the rest of the text is still too small? Right-click on the word and select “Remove @Brand_name” – this will bring other themes to light.

Now you can see what people are actually saying about your brand, allowing you to identify topical themes and hopefully address the concerns of your audience.

This handy manoeuvre can be used in conjunction with both active and passive online strategies.

Words which often crop up, particularly for service brands, are “queues”, “accounts”, “branch” etc.

If you notice an interesting theme from the word cloud, return to the All Mentions tab within the BrandsEye app and drill down within your data using the filters.

Content | matches | queue

In a qualitative way, this action would be useful both for understanding the limitations of your brand for example, insufficient pay-points in your branches and for spotting an opportunity to provide a 10 items or less queue.

It’s also important to pay attention to any names or Twitter handles which are noticeable in the word cloud. Either they’ve spoken a lot about your brand recently or other people have been consistently talking about them in reference to your brand.

Say for example, @John_Smith appeared in your brand’s word cloud; then suggested filters to find out what that conversation was about could be:

Author | contains | John_Smith [note that the @-sign has been omitted]

Content | matches | John_Smith [note that the @-sign has been omitted]

This action would drive active strategy where social media is used as a channel for sales or customer service. For example, responding immediately to a noisy and unhappy customer.

Once you know what themes are causing conversation about your brand you can judge which risks to your brand require immediate attention and which opportunities are valuable to pursue either now or at a later stage.

Ps. Feel free to do the same using filters for sentiment and media origin for example. Then follow up with a volume or sentiment report using the same filters within the Reports Tab for more insight into that conversation.

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Fast Decisions makes for Famous Brands

La'eeqah Galant — 2012-05-09T15:37:14+00:00

We’ve all heard of FNB’s @RBJacobs persona on Twitter, the FNB guy who is there to help you out in times of dire straits when a bank isn’t doing its job (Do they ever?). Today, he’s a prime example of how a company makes use of active strategy to address complaints on a case-by-case basis.

The overall aim of active brand monitoring is to be present and participate in online conversation as it happens, to provide customers with a more personalised experience of a brand. The Internet and the rise of Social Media have allowed brands to become active participants in their online conversation. FNB has realised that in order to remain relevant and approachable to your customers, one needs to begin to participate in this space.

The main purpose of RB Jacobs is to understand what the bank is doing (both right and wrong), solve queries and overall to engage with his community. It is through reaching their customers in a personal space that FNB has been better able to develop their customer channels.

Active brand monitoring is best used when dealing with micro business issues. As mentioned RB Jacobs deals with consumer queries and complaints on Twitter and aims to resolve them within 48 hours. FNB believes that assisting the consumer on a micro level helps to bridge the divide between their brand and consumer.

It is not the job of RB Jacobs to promote products or services offered by FNB as this engages with broader, more macro strategies of the bank. These aspects of a business are best dealt with in a passive brand tracking method.

RB Jacobs with his light-heartedness has transformed the FNB brand into an approachable and customer-friendly one.

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Learning from data to complement your online strategy

Chandrè Reddy — 2012-05-09T15:31:26+00:00

Understand your brand’s limitations and be inspired by consumer engagement to enhance your online strategy.

In an online space where most strategists learn from their consumers by actively engaging with them, another strategy is to indirectly find opportunity within their engagement. Passive learning is all about observation, whereby you as a brand closely monitor your consumers’ choices, behaviour and conversation.

In order to learn passively you'll need to understand your target market and the way in which they think, feel and go about their daily lives. This essentially means that consumers learn cognitively, through impulse and through experience; and that your brand should understand these driving forces in conjunction with what you take to market.

By understanding your consumers’ behaviour, your brand can passively respond to their needs and wants by taking actions which will fulfil them. For example, noticing that consumers often complain on social media that your queues may be too long. If this is the case, you could implement more pay points.

Another example could be to change your next campaign’s brand ambassadors if they didn’t optimally represent your brand in your last campaign or generate sufficient consumer engagement or AVE (Ad Value Equivalent). To some extent, this does tie in with active brand monitoring and engagement with your audience, where you’d use social media to respond on a case-by-case basis.

A passive approach allows you to take raw data and develop actionable strategies by asking the right questions of the data. Who's talking? On which platforms are they talking? What are they talking about? What are they always talking about and why?

Insights gained can be used to make changes going forward which will meet your consumers' demands and expectations. It also enables you to identify shortcomings and limitations on a macro level which are useful to consider when forward-planning.

Passive strategies are about making changes to your business which will render greater consumer satisfaction and ultimately influence your bottom line. A passive online strategy used in conjunction with active brand monitoring is a winning recipe.

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Tutorial: Working with Influencers in BrandsEye

Stacey Rumble — 2012-04-13T07:03:51+00:00

@staceyrumble

As a reputation analyst, I get lots of people asking me how they can work out how much value their influencers are generating for their brands. So I thought I’d put together a short ‘How-to’ to help you a: find out who your influencers are and b: then track how much value they’re generating for your brand.

1) How to work out who’s talking?

If you already know who your influencers are, go directly to Step 2 and collect 200 Monopoly Dollars! If you’re still learning about them, then log-in to your account :)

In the Reports Tab, select Custom Reports from the left-hand menu.

Select + New Report, give it a name and select + New Chart.

Give it a name and a description and select an Author report from the first drop down menu.

For example, you might want to look at who spoke about your brand in the last month, so select something like the following filters.

If you already know who a few of them are, exclude them so you can see others. You can do this simply by adding these filters (1 filter per influencer name). Please only use the text of their Twitter handle not the @-sign or any underscores. E.g. @yourbiggestfan or @celebrity_world would be inputted as follows:

Select preview and you’ll see a graph like this one. These are the people who you should consider reaching out to, to become influencers. Remember to save this report before you exit so you can easily view it next month.

2) How to set up the account so it tracks them?

In the Home Tab, select + New Brand and add an “Influencers” brand. Once you’ve saved it, you’ll see it appear in the left hand panel of the Home Tab. Select + New Brand again. Now add a sub-brand for each of the influencers you want to add.

Now to ensure you pick up all of their conversation about your brand, select the influencer’s brand & select Add Phrase. We suggest you add 2 phrases per influencer (1 for their name and 1 for their Twitter handle) and that their format look like this:

BrandsEye +timshier

BrandsEye +”Tim Shier”

Important: there must not be any space between the +-sign and the next word and your company’s name must feature in the phrase, otherwise you will pick up everything people say to them whether it’s relevant or not.

These phrases will start tracking from the moment they are saved.

3) Working out their value to your brand?

Select their brand in the left panel of the Home Tab, and you’ll be able to see how much value they’ve generated for your brand. This is represented by their Advert Value Equivalent (AVE) over the last week, month – which you can easily select above. Remember tracking will only include conversation after you added the phrases – so be sure to add these phrases as soon as possible during your campaign.

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My Talk With Nike SA's Key Brand Ambassador, Hayden Manuel

Greg Schneider — 2012-04-11T15:38:08+00:00

Yesterday I sat down with Hayden Manuel, one of Nike SA’s key brand ambassadors, for a brief 15 minute interview about his role as a brand influencer. An hour later I was still talking about Air Jordans and Air Maxes, with one of Cape Town’s most prominent Sneakerheads.

When Hayden begins talking about his over 70 pairs of sneakers you are immediately drawn in by his passion. It is clear this love affair for shoes started long before the freebies. Growing up in Cape Town, Hayden worked hard to build up his shoe collection and position as an urban influencer. Going to great lengths to fulfil the image, he proudly tells me how he would swap shoes with friends from different schools to ensure he was never seen in the same pair of Jordans twice. As an influencer in a sub culture that generates billions of dollars in revenue I was interested to find out more about the brand-influencer relationship.

One would be forgiven for thinking all brand influencers are sell-outs, milking their considerable online presence to punt brands that they support only for the pay cheque. Hayden is clearly different; his respectable online presence came long after he penned an agreement with Nike. I was interested to find out what drew a multinational brand like Nike to a fairly unknown kid from the Cape. Hayden was quick to point out that it was his authenticity rather than his reach that allows him to influence those around him and landed him his dream job. It seems that truly living a lifestyle that closely mimics the brand’s pillars is key, the correct personality will attract followers when combined with a brand. When looking for someone to act as an influencer, online reach is important, but should be the second consideration after the individual. Followers are fine, but it is the correct type of follower that’s key. Choose the incorrect person and those who were loyal to your brand may quickly desert you, was Hayden’s overarching sentiment.

I’ve never seen Hayden in the same cap or shoes and I was keen to find out what the expectation was from Nike in return for what seems like an endless supply of merchandise. Expecting to hear of contracts with key performance measures it came as a shock to hear that there was no directive to publize the brand. Hayden explained that it was his role to take Nike with him through his everyday life. It highlights the importance of choosing the correct influencer, the correct person was living the brand long before the sponsorship. A brand should look to simply tap into this lifestyle rather than govern it. Nike has placed their brand in Hayden’s hand and he was quick to acknowledge this level of trust. Swift to dismiss talk of ever changing brands, Hayden’s loyalty coupled with his sense of responsibility make him a powerful asset.

Stories of exclusive parties, secret meeting rooms and expensive sponsored shoes paint an appealing lifestyle. By the end of my hour session with Hayden I began toying with the idea of hitting eBay and placing a bid for some 1992 Air Jordans. Hayden, his personality, lifestyle and passion for his trade had won me over, a white boy from the suburbs. In true influencer style, it wasn’t the number of followers, the giveaways on his blog or endless retweets of the brand that won me over. It was a simple conversation with a Sneakerhead purist, committed to the lifestyle, which had me ready to part with my money for Nike’s product.

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The business of influence

Taryn Walker — 2012-04-11T10:31:43+00:00

How measuring our online impact has become big business

I have two friends – and everyone has friends like these – who are always in the know, always on top of things, and they like to share. They're smart, competent and well-respected, and when they suggest checking something out, it's almost inevitable I will.

It’s an opinion rarely disputed in marketing circles that word-of-mouth is one of the most effective, and powerful, tools to drive trial, brand engagement and brand preference. It is a channel on its own and a desired outcome for all other activity. "Did you see the latest Brand X advert? Oh, you have to see it. It's brilliant." "Did you know this about Brand W? Me neither. But I heard it on the radio this morning." "I had the best experience at Z this morning."

Word-of-mouth? Invaluable. Finding friends like mine to do the job? Priceless.

We now find ourselves, however, in the world of Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest. Where everyone has a voice and everyone else is, seemingly, listening. My followers are no longer seated around the dinner table but are now anywhere, and everywhere. In this new environment, how do we judge who really has the ability to impact the decision-making and opinions of others?

This is where the business starts to get, well, big. There are a lot of interested parties out there who want to know the answer and numerous startups have responded. Klout, a company based in San Francisco and launched in 2009, led the charge and, to many, created the industry. It uses a sophisticated, and secret, algorithm to determine your influence, looking at factors including how many people are listening and what they're doing with the content you put out there. And in the short while since their launch, a multitude of competitors have sprung up to vie for the best influence measurement title. Kred, PeerIndex, peekanalytics, spotInfluence and Traackr are just some. It is rapidly developing into a very crowded industry.

The business of measuring online influence, however, is not without its challengers – those who consider the current methods of measuring influence to be limited and simplistic. Can we really measure influence by the number of people just listening? Do these measurements take into account the nuanced nature of relationships in a social media context? Does a single tweet to millions make any of them actually get up and do something?

So, what's next for the world of online influence measurement? One thing is for certain – as the way in which we interact and communicate continues to evolve in our increasingly connected world, understanding and identifying who has the clout to influence others is going to get a lot trickier than simply recognizing my two smart friends. And as long as that’s the case? Well, that's big business.

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Influence vs Impressions

La'eeqah Galant — 2012-04-11T08:05:06+00:00

There is a greater art to being an Influencer than just creating a good impression of a brand on individuals. As people are continuously bombarded with advertising and brand marketing, there has become the fight for the individual’s attention. This has created the sphere of the influencer.

The best way to describe an influencer is, as a person whose opinions and preferences are followed by others to the point that they will influence their behaviour. They are individuals who make you want to be part of an overall brand experience as they enjoy sharing theirs with the weighted authority given to them by their audience.

Perhaps the most obvious statement is that not just anyone can be an influencer. It takes more than being the most loud and opinionated person of a group. Since the introduction of Klout and other such social influence aggregators, the art of being an influencer has turned to a science.

The three R’s of influence (which I like to consider as ROI – Return On Influence) is key to understanding if an individual is suited to being a brand influencer. The first is reach, what is the size of the individual’s audience. Second, is resonance, the measure of audience engagement, how many people within your audience are actually listening to what you are saying, The final of the three R’s is relevance, this is the alignment of the brand content with the individual. An individual needs a key balance between these three in order to be an effective influencer.

This concept of Return On Influence helps one understand how an influencer is able to change the action, behaviour, opinion and participation of their audience beyond just making an impression. This ROI gives an influencer a dedicated audience which follows them specifically because they are considered to be opinionated experts. Furthermore ROI helps to create the impression that an influencer is an individual who is easily related to and seen less as directly related to a brand but merely someone offering opinion. All this increases an influencer’s clout.

What do they do for brands? Most obviously they leverage their authority over a specific audience in order to influence their consumers’ behaviour. While some influencers are used to drive sales, the majority are used to foster an on-going social presence for brands. To create a community of followers that could at any time be leveraged for a campaign or activation.

Think you got what it takes? Check out the Top 10 Branding Influencers according to Klout, here.

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TECH UPDATE: 05/04/2012

Roger Norton — 2012-04-05T15:00:02+00:00

Most of what we’ve been up to are subtle changes to our backend systems to make sure that we can deliver more mentions to you faster. However, while we’ve been strengthening BrandsEye’s core we’ve also made a couple of improvements and tweaks to the various services...

Firstly, our iPhone app is now live in the AppStore. (Thanks Apple). It’s very similar to our Android app and allows you to view the most recent mentions of your brand on popular social media platforms.

We’ve also made a few improvements to our Crowd platform, most notably the appeals process. Now, when an appeal is successful, there is a small fee deducted off the users who originally agreed and it is paid as a bonus to the user who appealed. This creates a feedback loop to encourage people not to pick the answer that they think is correct, but what really is the best answer.

We’re also starting to add phrase bundles as a default option to our software packages, which means more accurate data for everyone! There’s plenty of growth happening on the crowd platform, just yesterday we hit a milestone of 500 000 ratings in just 4 months!

The application itself hasn’t been excluded either and some of the improvements are removing the case sensitive restriction on tags (to help remove duplications) and adding a longer history of mentions by any particular user. We also fixed a bug that was causing errors when a brand was deleted - so that should all be sorted now.

Sadly we’re also going to be doing away with the Blogger accounts at the end of this month. So if you use one of these I’d recommend getting in touch to upgrade now.

That’s all for now, but if you notice something that we could do better, we’re all ears.

Happy Easter.

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