Archive for the ‘Crowdsourcing’ Category

Blog, Crowdsourcing, Pulsar, Wired

Introducing Pulsar, Face Social Media Monitoring platform and Methodology

Date July 16 2009
Posted by Francesco
Tagged with

Pulsar, Face Social Media Immersion Platform and Methodology

When working on consumer immersion using ethnography, a relatively small panel is the only way forward. Clearly if you are a good researcher the results are very insightful. However, we’re nevertheless talking about involving 10, 20, 30 consumers, whose opinion will shape the outcome of the project and ultimately your strategic decisions.

Now, as far as ethnography and netnography are concerned and as far as the sample is representative, you still have to admit that you are basing your decisions on the opinions of an incredibly small group of consumers.

Now, what if you could do qualitative consumer immersion involving thousands of consumers?

Well that’s exactly what social media finally allows us to do: for the first time millions of opinions and conversations are available online in an endless, and mostly open, insights field. The problem is, how do you listen to so many opinions without losing the quality of the ethnographic approach over the quantitative reach of your antennas?

You need a good social media monitoring technology and a sophisticate methodology that will allow you to track, mine and understand massive buzz clouds. And that’s what we’re doing here at Face using Pulsar, our social media immersion technology and methodology that allows us to turn thousands of conversations into rich insights: quantity into quality.

Using APIs, tracking technologies, semantic analysis and social network analysis tools, Pulsar allows us to measure:

The Brand social media presence: How many conversations about you are going on over a certain period of time? When is the number of messages peaking? And why?

The Brand Quantitative and Qualitative visibility: Knowing the plain numbers of your social media presence isn’t going to help you unless you know how influential these conversations are. This is why Pulsar weighs the messages using our quantitative visibility algorithm and then assess the sentiment of these contents to tell you what part of your visibility is negative, positive and neutral.

The Topics, Issues and Perceptions: What are these conversations about? What are the emerging issues? How is your brand and your product/service perceived? What are the values that are most associated with your brand?

The Brand Social Network: Where are these conversations being held? What are the most influential sources? What are the channels that you should target?

The Brand Influencers: Finally, who are your influencers across blogs, forums, news sites and social networks? We then feed this insight into the planning process to get the most out of the crowdsourcing and co-creation processes.

We have been working on a number of new projects using Pulsar and some case studies will follow soon. In the meanwhile, if you feel like immersing in social media do get in touch!

Activation, Blog, Co-Creation, Crowdsourcing, Planning, Social Media, Uncategorized, Wired

Introducing Face Wired: co-created communications planning with social media at its core

Date July 15 2009
Posted by Francesco
Tagged with

Over the last few months we have been busy developing Face Wired and we are now proud to say it has officially launched.

What is Face Wired?  A department within Face that specializes in co-created communications planning, with social media at its core.

Why did we create Face Wired?  Face has a great track record of co-creating with consumers to add real value to projects, whether it is insights or new product development. We have now decided to develop this and apply our expertise and co-creation processes to communications planning. And social media is at the heart of all this.

Social Media isn’t just another marketing channel, it’s the main platform where all media contents converge in terms of distribution and consumption, from tv to gaming, from press to radio, and, most importantly, to personal communications. That’s why Social Media has become today the main platform connecting brands with consumers and that’s why it should always be at the core of the brand strategy and of all brand communications.

Using social media as the environment and the tool to manage and foster brand-consumer collaboration, we designed a three step process to engage consumers and influencers into co-creating communications planning concepts:

- Listening: this is the social media immersion stage where we use Pulsar, our proprietary social media monitoring technology, to map and analyze the buzz about the brand, chart the topics, the issues and the perceptions associated with the brand and identify the influencers that we should involve in the co-creation process.

- Plan: we then bring together a group of users, experts, influencers and brand stakeholder to kick off the actual brand-consumer collaboration. A set of online crowd-sourcing tasks helps us defining the agenda and generating the initial concepts. The most interesting and popular ones are then taken to a smaller sample and a set of co-creation tasks, online and offline, allow us to build on the initial concepts, further develop them and finalize the outputs.

- Engage: Once we have co-created the strategy Face then work closely with the brand to make sure the strategy is implemented correctly or to directly manage the execution. We then train the brand team so they have the skills to manage social media engagement with communities once we have gone.

We have already worked on two very successful pilot projects with Dr Pepper and with Lynx on the Dark Temptation variant launch, which has been their most successful variant to date. We are currently working with Carphone Warehouse on a project about social media strategy that will have organization wide implications and Boots, to co-create marketing insights and communications plans.

Stay tuned for more info and juicy social media case studies!