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Archive for the ‘Social Media’ Category

Blog, Face News, Research Methods, Social Data, Social Media

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[Webinar] 5 Things to Do with Social Data That Aren’t Keyword Tracking

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Social Data is incredibly rich and complex and lends itself to multiple research approaches. Keyword tracking is one of them but there’s more to social media research than just that. That’s exactly what our Chief Innovation Officer (CIO), Francesco D’Orazio, will be discussing in our next Webinar on May 8th. Registration is now open for “5 Things to Do with Social Data That Aren’t Keyword Tracking.”

Pulsar TRAC

Francesco will be using our new social media research platform, Pulsar TRAC, to help illustrate how you can use these techniques to get at insights around your brand and product on social channels that are deeper than what you would find with a straight keyword search.

Specifically, the 5 techniques we’ll be covering are:

Audience Mapping (The Brand Graph): This technique can inform a brand’s social media strategy and content strategies.

Real-time Segmentation: This type of study is key for business areas such as product innovation, product management, campaign planning, and service design.

Content Diffusion: Looking at how content travels on the social web can be used to optimize online content and track campaigns.

Influence Mapping: Identifying influential users or hubs can inform campaign planning, social media and content strategy, campaign management, social media management and social customer relationship management.

Community Augmentation: Social media can be incorporated into other research techniques, such as closed research communities, to stimulate creativity during innovation projects and provide a deeper understanding of participants.

We don’t want to ignore what you can get from the tried and true keyword search, though, so Francesco will also be touching on some of the more innovative techniques you can use with keyword tracking to reveal brand equity, awareness, mindshare, and advocacy within a category, audience, or against a set of competitors.

About the Speaker

Francesco D'Orazio

Francesco D’Orazio, isn’t only our CIO, but he’s also the chief mind behind Pulsar TRAC, our recently launch social media intelligence platform.

Francesco is also a regular speaker at research, innovation and technology conferences such as WARC, MRS, ESOMAR, AURA, World Business Forum, Word of Mouth Summit, Visual Web Convention, Virtual Worlds Forum, Serious Virtual Worlds, Digital Content Distribution, Engage Conference.

So, join us to learn how to take your social media intelligence beyond just keywords. Click the link below to register now.

Join us for “5 Things to Do with Social Data That Aren’t Keyword Tracking”

Wednesday, May 8th

3pm GMT/11am EDT

Register Here

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Want to learn more about Audience Mapping before the webinar? Read this case study we did with O2 Telecom in the UK.

Blog, Communities and Social Media Planning, Data visualisation & infographics, Face News, Future of Research, Innovation, Pulsar, Research Methods, Social Data, Social Media

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Face Launches Pulsar TRAC to Mine Big Social Data for Research

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- Pulsar TRAC moves the marketing industry beyond social media monitoring -

Today we are unveiling Pulsar TRAC, an advanced social intelligence platform which pushes social media research beyond keyword tracking.

Born out of 10 years experience of research and planning with social data, Pulsar TRAC is built on a robust intelligence framework enabling marketers to do more than just keyword tracking: measuring the reach of conversations, mapping brand audiences and tracking content diffusion.

Pulsar TRAC

It solves many of the issues found in current social media monitoring tools, such as the obsession with volume-led metrics, the lack of demographic and behavioural context, no understanding of the audience, poor interfaces and the inability to weight the impact of conversations.

That’s why Pulsar TRAC is the only platform on the market currently that allows mining of big social data in four new ways:

1) Visibility measurement- estimate the reach of each post

Top Posts by Visibility

2) Audience mapping – who are you talking to and what do they like

Find Real Influencers Screen

3) Content tracking – how does your content travel the social web

content tracking Content Tracking

4) Advanced filtering – 14 behavioural, contextual and demographic filters to find exactly what you are looking for

Advanced filters

“We’ve been really impressed with the speed and efficiency of Pulsar TRAC and its ability to provide real time actionable insight. We’re particularly excited about the audience mapping and content diffusion capabilities – they allow us to really target and understand specific groups of people in real-time.” - Jake Steadman, Head of Real Time Research at O2 Telefonica.

“Face’s Pulsar TRAC is invaluable for identifying real-time insight into the way that our audiences are engaging with content and stories. The key difference with PULSAR TRAC is that the platform offers a high quality social media insight system, supported by analysis that creates meaningful stories from the data with clear actionable steps for our business.” - Justin Wyatt, Vice President of Primary Research at NBC Universal.

Engineered for complexity, scale and speed, Pulsar’s Big Data engine is built on Apache Cassandra and Solr. This enables Pulsar TRAC to store and index multiple data points besides keyword mentions, including social graphs, interest graphs, demographics and behavioural data.

Our Chief Innovation Officer, Francesco D’Orazio, explains what drove the design of Pulsar TRAC:

“There are more than 200 social media monitoring tools on the market, and yet none of them allowed us to do proper research on social media data. And that’s why we built Pulsar TRAC. Whereas all traditional social media monitoring platforms on the market only look at the content of the conversations, we found a massive opportunity in indexing and analysing everything around it. This means very Big Data. But with Pulsar TRAC we can now process all that and still deliver on the real-time user experience which is key to exploiting Big Data’s real potential: finding out what you don’t know you don’t know.”

Our CEO, Andrew Needham, comments:

“With Pulsar TRAC we are delivering on our vision of social intelligence for brands by helping companies put consumers at the heart of their business, giving them a real time, in depth and holistic view of their customers. Having doubled in size in the past 12 months with offices in New York, Singapore and Hong Kong, Pulsar TRAC is the first in a series of planned product releases from Face which marks an evolution of the business from a research agency to a technology driven insight consultancy.”

The Pulsar TRAC platform, designed to deliver real-time insights for global brands and agencies, is now available at www.pulsarplatform.com. Please contact us to get more information or request a demo.

Future of Research, Social Data, Social Media, Wired

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Why Market Researchers Should Learn To Code

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The internet and digital technologies are an integral part of the modern world – and as marketers and researchers, we are immersed in this space. We’re helping brands communicate effectively in social media, we’re creating new digital products and understanding online customer experiences – and we’re doing it this through online communities, social media insight and mobile research apps.

But there’s a problem

The dirty little secret is, how far does the industry really understand the technological ground it walks upon? Research firms mostly hire people with degrees in psychology, social sciences and humanities. Don’t get me wrong, these are great subjects and give us a lot of insight into human behaviour and culture. Problem is, it leaves us only observers of the technological world – not hackers and makers.

As a result, innovation in the research industry is not keeping up with the technology:

“We lag behind. Sometimes by years – in the case of harnessing communities, we worked out how to do it just as the ‘community’ model was dissolving online into networks. In the case of gamification, we were a bit quicker, only a year or so behind the overall hype. Intellectually speaking, research is largely a distant, rather slow cousin of the tech business.”
[Tom Ewing, Blackbeard Blog, 22 March]

A quick test: how many of these tech acronyms do you recognise?

  • API
  • TCP/IP
  • CSS
  • W3C
  • SaaS
  • FOMO

That last one’s a bit of a trick: it’s not a technology but the acronym Fear Of Missing Out – or #fomo, as teen Twitter natives would put it. And “missing out” is exactly what the research industry is doing if we don’t really understand the technical ground our digital world is built on.

Here’s one of those building blocks: all the information encoded within a tweet and accessible through the Twitter API. If you want to innovate in social media research, you’ve got to know what options you have to play with. But how many in the industry do?

tweet code

Map Of A Twitter Status Object by Raffi Kikorian (@raffi)

What can research companies do about it? Hiring a creative technologist is a good start, as we said in our “Emerging Roles in Research” blog post a year ago. But as ethnographers we have another tool up our sleeves: it’s called participant observation. Learning by doing. Learning to code, and learning to build basic web technologies ourselves. Sound scary? It shouldn’t be.

Minibar Codemaker

A couple of weeks ago, Linda Maruta and I (Jess Owens) went to Codemaker, run by the UK tech meet-up MiniBar. In just eight hours this course covered:

  • A condensed history of computing and the web
  • A lesson in tech jargon – from API & OS to Python, Ruby and MySQL
  • How the modern web works – the technologies behind Twitter, Facebook and Google
  • Mix & Mash your favourite websites
  •  How to make beautiful web sites with HTML and CSS
  • JavaScript and JQuery
  • Deconstruct your own web app (intro to Agile principles)
  • Make your own web app

It was a pretty fast-moving course, and it helped to have some familiarity with coding already. Linda’s our Digital Project Manager and works with our developer team day in, day out. I work in the social media team – and both of us went into the course knowing some HTML, a bit of CSS and our Twitter API from our elbows.

Nonetheless, by mid-afternoon we were doing far more than we’d ever expected – mashing up Google Maps data with real-time geolocated Twitter information and public datasets. It was awesome.

A course like this won’t make anybody a fully-fledged programmer in a day – instructor Peter Brownell is great but he’s not a magician. But it will leave you knowing much more about how web technologies work, and collaborating better with developers on social data projects in future. That’s worth the entry price alone.

But more than that, this course left me excited.  I’ve been friends with programmers for years, but somehow coding has never seemed like something I could really do – it was just too big a body of knowledge to learn. But this course changed that: it showed me how to start. Best of all, it gave us all the tools – JQuery examples, JSFiddle to play with the code live, and geodata via Google Fusion Tables - to go away and keep playing, and experimenting, and learning.

JSfiddle

Another way

While I was writing this post I realised: there are other ways to learn these things. Several of my FACE colleagues have next-generation Masters degrees marrying the social with the technological, from programmes that including courses in coding and building digital media alongside more standard soc sci methods. And it’s not just the social media team I’m talking about here – FACE qual researchers have studied these courses too. Think Masters degrees such as Advanced Interactive Technology Design (Nottingham), Digital Media (Goldsmiths) and Digital Humanities (UCL). The academic training may only have been out there in the last 5 years, but there’s a new generation of graduates coming through with some very next-generation skills.

And these are skills the research industry is crying out for. Let’s not bemoan a ‘talent shortage’, let’s get out there building links, speaking at universities, providing work experience and sharing research technology. That’s how you hire the next generation of researchers.

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Jess is Social Media Research Manager at FACE. Check out her other blog posts on digital culture and technology here, or share your thoughts on this article with us at @FaceCocreation. 

 

Advertising, Insights, Social Media, Trends

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Limits to Linkbait? Margaret Thatcher & 6 Brand Bandwagon Jumpers

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Planning, Social Media

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Content is like an onion, it has layers

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Do you remember how in the movie Shrek, the title character compares ogres to onions, saying that ogres have layers too? (If you don’t get the reference, go watch Shrek again!)

Well, like onions (and ogres), content also has layers. There is the first layer, the layer you see without engaging with the content at all, and then there’s a second layer which is what people see when they investigate. This could be clicking on the tweeted link, playing the banner ad video, going to the originating Facebook page, or anything else that expands the message of that content. And there could be more layers beyond that, depending on your consumer journey.

Shrek explaining to Donkey that onions and ogres have layers

The holy grail of content marketing right now seems to be making content into bite-size bits that we can engage with and pass on, supposedly furthering the ends of the content creator. Many brands are trying to piggy-back off of popular web memes, like Wonderful Pistachios and their Psy/Gagnam Style Superbowl Ad.

But this misses out on that second layer of interaction. People see things and pass them on, frequently without reading or investigating them first. Just think of all the fun or interesting images you’ve seen on Facebook in the past week that you’ve then reposted, liked or commented on. How often did you read the full description of the image and click on through to the originating Facebook page? If you’re like me, and many other folk, probably not too often. After all, what you’re sharing is that image, not the page, right? This type of behavior is encouraged, too – One click sharing is common on all social networks.

People also can add layers to the content, adapting it to their own purposes. When I re-share images on Facebook, I often add my own message. But am I furthering the purposes of those brands? On a certain level, yes. I am literally forwarding the link on to my friends. But will my friends click through to those pages, or just admire the image and my witty comment?

Facebook image shared on Facebook with a comment.

So on one side, people often add layers to content already in existence and otherwise engage with it by sharing and liking, but on the other, they are not investigating. The danger with this is that their knowledge and understanding of your brand has not been expanded. In order for that to happen, they must investigate your content, click through and explore the second layer, and possibly other layers beneath that. But at the same time, sharing is probably the best way to increase your brand profile.

So how do you create content that will help your brand transform engagement into investigation? Here are 4 tips for the marketing content creator:

  1. Make every layer self-sufficient. If your image has your main message, then it’s okay if people don’t click through to see your Facebook Page, or even read the descriptions you’ve attached to it. It’s right there in the image. This can be tough though as you are forced to perhaps hit people over the head with your brand, limiting the content’s shareability. This is the tactic that Wonderful Pistachios has taken. You just watch the fun videos and you know what their message is.

  2. Make content that people want to investigate, not just engage with. I like Kraft Foods as an example of this. Their Pinterest Page is full of lovely images of yummy foods – as a foodie and cook it’s hard to resist sharing these images. At the same time, they are clearly labelled as recipes – and are just a click away from the recipes themselves on the Kraft website. So not only do they encourage engagement (sharing) but also investigation (clicking through).

  3. Piggy-backing off of point 2, use the data and tools you have at your disposal to make content more personally relevant for people. For instance, you can use real time data such as weather and time of day to present people the type of ads they are going to be more interested in. If it’s rainy, show me sunny vacation destinations. Or a rain coat. Technology is becoming a third part of the classic Art and Copy creative team. Take advantage of it.

  4. Don’t be limited by your industry. Yes, some industries seem more prone creating content people should investigate rather than share, such as the real estate market. But, Zillow has managed to make real estate and home maintenance fun, with a top layer of Eye Candy and Tips and Advice columns that combine information with pretty pictures. Their articles are fun reads and easy to share, getting their message through quickly and clearly: Zillow is a fun place to talk about real estate (and they’ll also help you find or sell a house, too).
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