Author Archive

Augmented Research, Blog, Conferences, Innovation, Mobile, Social Media, The Future, sxsw

The Brand as API. Brand-centered vs User-centered Architectures.

Date March 11 2012
Posted by Francesco
Tagged with

As someone who has been working on the idea of making brands human by plugging them into the fabric of society, today I definitely couldn’t miss a session called “Brand As API” hosted by Peg Faimon and Glen Platt from the Armstrong Institute for Interactive Media Studies, Miami University Oxford, Ohio.

The premise is clear and simple, and extremely agreeable:

“As brands finally begin to deliver on the promise of a 1-to-1 relationship with their customers (through social media, mobile, and data-driven tools), it is critical to develop a new foundation for that relationship. This requires brands to leave the “broadcast relationship” and, instead, build a relationship sharing communication, innovation, and the very product/service itself. Insight into this relationship can be found in the structure, language, and use of APIs (Application Programming Interface). APIs provide a set of rules – a language for connecting to data and services. To remix. To build. To leverage. To extend. Many API calls provide explicit metaphors for the ways brands can connect to customers. Generally, the API relationship provides insights into the role of brands in the customers’ life. This conversation will explore these metaphors, share case studies, and work to build a language for better connecting consumers with their brands.”

You can look at the full presentation below and get the details on how they think a brand as API might work.

The main idea behind the concept of the Brand as API is that it would allow to open up the Brand, its assets and its services and allow people (consumers, businesses, developers) to do things with that Brand, from playing with the contents and the identity of the brand all the way down to designing products and services.

Peg and Glen went on discussing the key elements of an API and how they relate and map against new ways of building meaningful relationships between brand and consumers.

While this is completely agreeable and sensible, the idea of the Brand as API as crafted in this presentation still seems to rely on two assumptions:

1) The assumption that people want to do stuff with that Brand, pulling information and data assets off a Brand in order to create something custom. And while we know this is true, we also know this only applies to a very small percentage of the user base of the Brand.

2) And the mother of all assumptions: the belief that the relationships consumers have with brands are primary while we know that consumers’ most valuable relationships are with other consumers, and what brand CAN try and do is fit in those relationships in a meaningful and/or useful way, i.e. as social currency or enablers/problem solvers.

It seems that while the analogy between brands and APIs has got incredibly long legs, we are still looking at it from the wrong perspective: the brand perspective.

What if, instead of focussing on what the API allows the user to Pull we start focussing on what the API allows the user to PUSH, meaning allowing the user to ingest a controlled and owned selection of brand-relevant personal data into the brand API such as user context, passions, interests and behaviours?

What if I could feed for example my location data to the API of my mobile network operator (plugging in my mobile gps, Foursquare or Sonar data) and get the most customised international plan based on my travel habits?

And what if consumers could ‘sell’ this personal data to brands? Consumers used to pay brands for products. We are now heading towards a future where digital data abundance means brands are going to pay consumers for their personal data. Users get customised offerings while remaining in control of their personal data, brands increase their relevance by investing on live audience intelligence rather than push strategies.

This is why I believe the biggest added value of a Brand API lies not so much in the ability to provide a Brand-to-User stream of data rather in its ability to manage a bi-drectional stream of data, where the user can shape the brand around itself using the vast amounts of personal data he is in control of.

And this is why i believe the biggest and most important asset of a brand API is not the Brand Essence, rather the User Profile.

Such an API would not be shaped around the brand but around the user and his needs. And effectively it would be an Audience API rather than a Brand API. Something that could sit at the centre of the business and power any decision the business has to take, from innovation to marketing to CRM.

But the thing is, in order to be plugged into the fabric of society brands probably need both, or even more than two APIs. Like any other social product/service out there.

Brand As API – SXSW 2012 Presentation

View more presentations from Armstrong Institute for Interactive Media Studies, Miami University

Augmented Research, Awards, Blog, Insights, Oscars, Pulsar, SMinR, Social Media

Is a silent, black & white movie the strongest Oscars favourite ever? Social Media meets the Bookies.

Date February 25 2012
Posted by Francesco
Tagged with

Increasingly, companies and organisations are using social media as a crystal ball to predict the future. Negative spikes in sentiment to predict a drop in stock prices, explosive volumes of mentions to predict the election of a candidate (or a hung parliament, as Tweetminister predicted at the last elections. Check out a couple more examples here and here)

So far the trick worked: high levels of social media mentions and engagement = social relevance. But this case is different. Nine films are nominated for Best Picture at Sunday’s Oscars. According to many sources, “The Artist” is the favorite to claim the big prize. But the Academy choses the winners, not the general public. Or does it?

Yes and no. The members of the Academy are members of the audience too, and as such they are influenced by the people who surround them, especially the ones that are most similar to them, and share similar tastes. However, there are many other factors that come into play in this case, and a simple prediction model based on social relevance (= high levels of mentions, sentiment, engagement) will probably not do the trick.

First of all, sheer volumes of mentions in this case are less relevant than they are in a political election or in any other public event shaped by the audience.

A few other studies on the Oscars have used volumes of tweets or likes on Facebook as indicators. One study is predicting The Help to be the absolute favourite. Another one predicts the Midnight in Paris to be the favourite. There seems to be a little confusion around.

Our data points elsewhere. First of all, we didn’t just measure volumes of mentions of the movie, we looked at volumes of mentions in relation to the award nomination. And not only at that: we looked at the sentiment of those mentions, their visibility and the engagement they generated.

Second, this can’t be just about social media as the final judgement will be expressed by a panel of experts/practitioners. We think social media data is most useful when mapped against other data streams, because social media doesn’t happen in a void.

This approach is part of what we call Augmented Research. In this study AR meant combining the following streams of data harvested for two weeks (Feb 7th – Feb 21st):

1) Volume of tweets, status updates, blog posts, forum posts, news articles, images and videos.
2) Odds for each movie nominated against each Award.
3) Box Office Data for each movie.
4) Experts ranking via Polls and online ratings.

So we have been looking at something like this for each movie:

We are not going to delve into the details of the graph above, but what is interesting is that there seems to be a correlation between the box office data and the social media data. Peaks at the box office anticipate peaks in social media in smaller and smaller increments. We haven’t seen any of the opposite: peaks in social media anticipating peaks in the box office data. Which could potentially indicate something interesting in terms of influence dynamics and the relationship between traditional media and social media, at least for now.

But let’s not digress. We wanted to see if any of the above could be of any use to predict which film is going to win the Oscar for Best Picture on Sunday.

We started looking at volumes of buzz around each of the nine nominated movies (Feb 7th – Feb 21st). The doughnut below shows days as circles and within each circle the proportion of buzz associated to each movie.

According to this model, The Help should be the Oscars favourite, but the ranking is rather balanced:

1) THE HELP
2) MONEYBALL
3) THE ARTIST
4) THE DESCENDANTS

We then introduced the Sentiment of those conversations in order to weight volumes. But the landscape got even more balanced. Unfortunately.

We decided to try something else. When it comes to the Oscars, social relevance doesn’t necessarily mean being Award-worthy. So we then looked at just the conversations that were related to the Oscar nomination for Best Picture (“movie title” + “Oscars” | “movie title” + “Best Picture” and so on for 15 stings per movie, Feb07th-Feb21st). We started seeing some clear movements in the chart.

The Artist got some serious traction and the new ranking looked like this:

1) THE ARTIST
2) THE HELP
3) HUGO
4) THE DESCENDANTS

Although The Artist looks solidly ahead (more than double the volumes than any of the contenders), there is still a good chance of a catch up, especially since all the top contenders are extremely close to each other.

We needed another opinion, and we asked it off the people who are actually closer to it all: the critics. We pulled some good data off Metacritic and layered the critics score on top of the social media scores. We used the Metascore, based on 40+ critics globally for each movie. And this is the result.

The Artist is now clearly running away and the competition lags behind in a rather compact front of four movies including The Descendants, Hugo, The Help and Moneyball.

In search for an even safer bet we then looked at the betting experts. We layered the daily data coming from the bookies for each movie on top of the social media data. And this is what happened…

Well, this kind of helps. I guess we will be placing our bets on The Artist as Best Picture at the 2012 Oscars.

A few people have been campaigning in support of The Artist. We mapped them out and found out that one of them is Bret Easton Ellis.

We will be watching the Awards Ceremony tomorrow night and check whether our prediction was any good. Not that we are going to make any money though, looks like this is the safest bet ever.