Digital Influence Mapping Project

The Trends in Next Generation Listening Posts (and Looking Glass)

We have reviewed and worked with many of the leading technology companies curently providing consumer generated media (cgm) monitoring solutions for brands. After having done two enterprise-level evaluations for global brands - each with different geographic focus - it is clear that the market is shifting.

We just went through a deep-dive on Microsoft's Looking Glass which points to a further evolution of the market towards in-house and integrated solutions. Is that defiance of the SaS model or are they accurately anticipating where big brands need to go in the future?  

Before I get to Looking Glass, Here are a few of the trends I am seeing:

1. the early lead of service providers who do everything from the technology to the insights is falling away. In its place are dashboard technology providers that put the tools in the hands of brands and agencies - the folks that know the brand business. Even Nielsen has a simple dashboard solution.

2. technologies are focusing on 1-2 of the 7 major purposes of Listening Posts. They are slowly focusing their strengths in certain areas and being more open about admitting what their solution or organization cannot support

3. there is a whole new set of technology providers who are building a flexible framework to be applied to multiple language markets. Once you broaden your view to identifying technologies that work across 4 or 5 language and geographic markets, you suddenly see a whole new set of providers like eCairn, Attentio, Brandwatch and others popup.

4. automated sentiment rating continues to be a holy grail (solutions with 60% accuracy are near-useless) except amongst a very few who have made progress notably Crimson Hexagon and Collective Intellect.

5. brands are splitting between those that want simple and fast and those that want tailored and highly relevant. Radian6 smartly stepped into the simple and fast space and continues to excel there even as others launch comparable "monitoring-only" solutions. A few brands have buy-in to invest the time and money for more tailored solutions. Which brings us to:

Microsoft's Looking Glass

We recently met with the development team at Microsoft responsible for their monitoring/listening solution dubbed Looking Glass. The solution is a 3 server-based model and sits on top of or integrates with Silverlight for the display layer, SQL server and Sharepoint. It is a work in progress and has some significant advantages over other solutions depending on which of the 7 reasons you need a Listening Post and what other Microsoft investments you have made.   

Here are 4 reasons that Looking Glass may be great for enterprise listening:

1. It uses Bing for blog and Web search. That engine will likely provide a strong heart for teh service for years to come.

2. Its real power is in the customizability down to its ability to pull in new data feeds. That means that enterprise can combine data feeds that are most relevant to them (the future of Social IRM is in the integration with CRM databases. This platform will handle that.

3. The Silverlight-powered display is good-looking. Don't underestimate the power of great information design to make listening solutions usable.

4. Like Visible Tech it features task-delegation functions. If you want to assign someone to respond to a Tweet or a post, you can do that within the system and track those responses.

This is meant for the more advanced enterprise willing to invest the integration and customization hours never mind the hosting/serving of it. As we move towards more advanced models of integrating cgm listening into the enterprise like the Social IRM model, the Looking Glass model may be a strong solution. Everyone awaits the debut of the next Google Labs experiment where they deliver the 30 ton megaton bomb on teh listening market with their own solution. I only presume that is somewhere inside their skunkworks....

Ogilvy World of Influencers: The Double Think

As I have come to learn in my travels around the Ogilvy network, there are an awful lot of smart and interesting people within Ogilvy. And a lot of them are impressive social media thought leaders. While other companies have been shouting about how 'social' they are and even some of those taking pot-shots at the boogeymen "big agencies", Ogilvy has been quite naturally fostering some truly interesting voices around the world.

First in a series of posts and tweets that highlight my new influences (i.e. new influencers), today I am spending time on Dimitri Maex,  Managing Director Marketing Effectiveness for Ogilvy based in NYC. I know him as the head Web Analytics guy. He's also the guy that can help Irfan and I take Conversation Impact to a new level (Conversation Impact is our measurement model for social media marketing) but that's a different post.

Dimitri can be found in all the usual places -Facebook, Twitter - and he's got a pretty cool blog he shares with Colin Mitchell, Chief Strategy Officer for Ogilvy in North America called The Double Think.

The Double Think
Dimitri and Colin co-author the blog offering a split-screen approach to analysis and planning. I actually don't know which posts to attribute to either one although common sense would suggest that the ones on the left are Dimitri's and those on the right are Colin's. If I have that wrong, my apologies.

I love their posts on measurement and visualizations.

In a recent post on the History of Scientific Marketing, they cover the evolution of the use of mathemateics in marketing from the early years of direct response to the present. Thorough and almost academic, Dimitri reveals his passion for his subject. This is clearest when he gets to the present era - the Fourth Era: Digital Effectiveness. Here's a slice of that passion:

"E-commerce environments provide us with a closed-loop system, which in marketing effectiveness terms gets us close to nirvana.  Digital media data can show us exactly which media individuals have been exposed to.  Website data can show us where individuals came from (or, in the case of search, what terms they typed in to arrive at a site).  We can then observe these individuals’ entire shopping behavior, all the way to their actual conversion to a sale.  With more and more media becoming digital, we could easily imagine a scenario where most, if not all, media exposures can be traced to an individual sale."

Clearly he is talking about an ideal that remains difficult to realize. But I sense that Dimitri and his team are close to pulling this off ona routine basis.

As for visualizations, they tend to unearth some interesting tools and research like the post On the Death of Fads. At it's heart is a Wharton/Stanford paper on the trajectroy of children's names - how long they remain "in" or how quickly they pass out of favor.

Follow Dimitri (and Colin), they are part of a expanding group of thoughtleaders thinking (and doing)  about the intersection of marketing, communications, social media and how we are all changing.

WOMMA Highlight Video From New WOMM Report

Last week, WOMMA released a new word of mouth marketing forecast report created by PQ Media. The data on growth is amazing. Like many reports, there is a lot there. John Moore, WOMMA's resident WOM Enthusiast, distilled down many of its significant points into this great video. You can keep abreast of his POV on his WOMMA blog, All Things WOM:

Ogilvy's 360 Digital Influence team is featured in the report.  As a WOMMA member, you would already have the report as a value of membership. If you are interested in getting your hands on the report, you can get more information at WOMMA.

Why Twinfluence is Actually Helpful

There have been a lot of utilities developed to help us understand who may be influential or what conversations are dominating in the social web. From the dawn of BlogPulse to a hundred (I presume) utilities born from the Twitter API.

Some are helpful. Some just make cool graphs. Some are broken. Many use their own criteria for ranking or evaluating data. This requires us all to accept a new lexicon to get much out of the the results. Some day soon, I will make a project of recording all of the most common definitions for "influence" from the various tools we use, the academics and pundits and our own strategy team.

Twinfluence
Beyond the information that Twinfluence displays, their second biggest asset is the clear and open description of what they are doing to crunch the data from 146,636 twitterers. They report our against Reach, Velocity and Social Capital.

Reach is pretty straightforward. Thye count followers and estimate second level followers of those.  For my Twitter handle - jbell99 - my rank is #11,473 (92%). That means that out of 146K I am 11k on the list. I rank 92% higher than others in the collection.

Velocity groups similar twitters together so you are not comparing me to Samantha Ronson with her 830K followers. Overall, it is trying to indicate how fast someone is picking up followers. Depending on what you are trying to learn, I would argue this may not be that highly relevant. So long as a twitterer continues to add followers at even a low rate, depending on their reach, of course, they can be highly influential in their field.

Social Capital is the least useful of the measures. As Twinfluence puts it: "..It's essentially a measure of how influential are a twitterer's followers. A high value indicates that most of that Twitterer's followers have a lot of followers themselves...as twitterers build their follower network, their social capital tends to start very high, build for a while, then slowly decrease. This is probably because as most people start tweeting, they follow a few high-profile twitterers who may reciprocate. Over time, however, they attract more and more people - and that means more and more people with few followers, including bots, spammers, and silent followers."

So, social capital as they label it tends to follow a fairly predictive path for most users.

Twinfluence on ManyEyes
Now take the data from Twinflunce and jam it donw the pipes of IBM's Many Eyes, a visualization utility that displays cool Java interactives of different data.

Here is a display of Science "Tweeps" data from April and June that allows you to click inside the display to get detail and toggle settings to understand the growth rate differential between some of the Tweeps - Treehugger doubles their followers while RichardWiseman goes from 1100 followers to 7,700 by June.

The ManyEyes display is interesting yet remains a static snapshot of that April and June timeperiod. The IBM (client) platform is a neat way to make data more meaningful. Now if we were to idenify collections along the lines of Ogilvy's segmented influencers (e.g. design geeks, Mom-twitterers, etc...) and take monthly or even quarterly snapshots like what 2020Science did here, we might have an interesting and useful display.

Recommendation: Add Twinfluence to your DIY dashboard mapping influence and use the Reach and even Velocity numbers to help inform your effort (Social Capital shoudl be renamed and even then it's true value is not clear)

Try importing data into Many Eyes, you may be surprised.

5 Steps to Choosing the Right Listening Post Solution

We always start with listening. We listen to what people say in blogs about things that matter to them, when they tweet about the brands in their lives, public discussions in forums and review sites. The social media (r)evolution has eaked along enough that most marketers would say they start with listening. We are presenting today at OMMA Social in NYC alongside our good friend Pepper Roukas at American Express. Our topic is Listening Posts. I wanted to share my experience choosing and creating solutions for ourselves and our clients.

Choose Wisely

How do you select the right listening "solution" for you? I say 'solution' as it isn't as simple as choosing a technology provider - one of the 120 or so who provide some form of cgm monitoring. Thinking it's all about technology will leave you with a technology contract and 2 months of data for which many execs in the company scratch their head and say "so what." To select and implement a program that has a quantifiable impact on your business, I would suggest following these five steps.

1. Define Your Listening Goals Across the Enterprise
CGM Listening can be a powerful additon to marketing, communications, customer service, product development and more. Different groups within the company can benefit. Since the infrastructire of a listening post has significant combined hard and soft costs, it only makes sense to try and leverage a solution across as many needs as possible.

There are really three essential purposes of a Listening Post:

• Guide marketing, communications and product strategy via insights from conversations
• Establish a rapid-response system to what is said across the Social Web
• Create a measurement benchmark and reporting system for word of mouth

Different groups will want a system that does different things. Marketing may want 1 and 3. Communications 2 and 3. Product development may want to learn insights from what customers are saying about the product. Customer Service may want a way to respond quickly to concerns and complaints.

It is possible that you need all of these bases covered. Just as likely is that one of these has become the urgent interest and you need to satisfy it without cutting yourself off from the future.

2. Map Out the Work Flow That Fits Your Organization
Whether your a communications team member, part of marketing or trying to solve cgm listening needs across the enterprise, taking a moment to map out how the information is collected, translated into insight and then applied to action will save you time and frustration later.

I purposely didn't say "document your requirements" - not because you shouldn't but more because its obvious. Starting by mapping data-to-insight-action and how the workflow can actually happen in your organization is a great place to start.

If you are prmarily looking for Marcom insight, who is responsible for that now? Is there a insights and research person in your midst who can shepard this new source? If so, how are their reports and insights recieved now? Are they used to working at a fast, real-time clip? How geeky are they from a lexicon to a technology way?  Can they handle the interface themselves or will they need help?

Who owns the action taken from the Listenin Post goals you determined above? That will tell you a lot about how the path the information must take to convert into first insight and then action.

You may need to outsource or get help from a trusted partner to do some of this. By mapping out the process, you will discover your needs ahead of time.

3. Create a Prototypical Report
It's always helpful to envison the solution. Then you can make decisions and build to get yourself there. Creating a prototypical report with real data is a giant step towards knowing what you want. I suggest that you think of two reports - the voluminous one that you just can't help yourself from making and the 1-pager that will get to the C-suite.

Start by defining the 'conversation criteria.' These are the terms and phrases that will help you find conversations on brand-related topics. It may be brand mentions, competitors but even more important are those topics that intersect between customers and the brand. If you are a bank or financial services firm, it may be discussions parents are having about sending their kids to college or buying a house. 

The conversation is what you put into the listening engine. How well you do this step will determine how useful the output of the engine.

You can actually get data two ways:

• You can ask one of the technology companies to do you a solid and let you test drive the service. This is tricky as many of the them require a significant 'boot-up' phase where they feed the conversatoin criteria in and weed out erroneous or spam data. Still it is possible with some.

• You can also do this by hand. Using many of the available listening programs out there, you can get a pretty good bead on what people are saying

4. Review 3-4 of the Recommended Leaders
Don't look at them all. You'll go blind, become resentful or just plain lose all your time to the task. Find the 2-3 you think fit what you need and then throw a wildcard choice in there.

Depending on your answer to #1 above, you will weight these things differently. Most listening post tasks can be broken down into four steps:

Collecting

• What is the source collection the service is using? Many subscribe to third party sources that are limited in terms of what they have in them (e.g. some may only look at 10m blogs)
• What types of cgm do they collect? Blogs, Twitter, Video, Traditional media, Forums, Review sites....

Rating and Sorting

• Are they keyword-based or is there a more rigorous sentiment process?

• If they claim a machine-driven sentiment rating system, can you see it in action? (this is one of the hardest things to get tech to do well)
• How do they facilitate cleaning up the most likely spam? This is asking how they optimize the collection.
• What is the interface for adding human rating to the results?
• What is their proprietary vocabulary for things like influence? Every technology company comes up with something and often it is quite...let's just say 'special.'
• Do they identify "influencers" or whatever they call them from within conversations and what criteria do they use to determine influence?

Reporting

• What are the top three reports the system can generate?
• What is the most useful visual report they can make? ( I know of whole systems that provide little value beyond a couple of cool visuals. I am not saying that is enough but don't underestimate the value of a great social graph visual to a senior executive)
• Can you create a one-pager, preferably a pdf, to make that C-suite deliverable? How easy does thsi system make that?

Insights into action

Does the technology provide insights and action steps? This is a big, trick question. None can do this and anyone who claims this is likely lying or positioning their staff as expert strategists. This is the big reason why my team only offers Listening POst powered by X(we use three different technologies). Our listening Post is made useful because of the care we put into efficiently distilling data into insights and action (and determining the objective and defining the conversation criteria at the head of the program.)

5. Run a 3-month Pilot Program
Everyone needs results quickly. Many of the platform choices you may make require time to get up and running and refine results. If you plan a 3 month pilot, you give yourself a reasonable amount of time to prove out the choice, refine it and be able to communicate to the rest of the organization the value the solution is providing.

6 Directions on Social Media Measurement: How Will We Come Together?

There are lots of interesting efforts to make sense of Social Media Marketing which I often refer to as Word of Mouth Marketing since that is the outcome of most social media-based efforts. We are somewhere in the second third of our journey towards meaningful, shared measurement. We are in that part where we wrestle with credible yet cimbersome models and pine fo rthe simplicity that came before. Don't we all wish we had "reach and frequency" goals? Doesn't it seem like social media marketing is being held to ahigher standard than the disciplines that came before?

Recently, I have been drawn into or tracking at least 6 different efforts to make sense of soaicl media marketing measurement. It's useful to become aware of them all. Still, the question remains - are we better off with this English-garden growth of discussions, forums, white-paper symposiums, or do we need "one ring to bind them all?"

IAB Social Media Measurement
The IAB recently releasedtheir social media metrics guidelines. These tackle the space from an "advertisers" POV. They are also trying to develop meaningful KPIs that acknowledge what the space does well - foster conversations - and what marketers want - a way to place their brand in the conversation. Here is a snapshot from the Guidelines:

"Ad campaigns can target a single blog or multiple blogs by category using traditional
interactive reach and audience metrics. However, additional targeting value can also be
derived by mapping campaigns to blogs engaged in common “conversations” through the
form of shared links, referencing each-other’s content. The social connection of publisher-to-publisher relationships through these content links aggregates engaged consumers into a
desirable and topic-engaged audience.

The ability to aggregate audiences by topic is dynamic, following the dialogue consumers are having. Following these “conversations”, an advertiser or brand evangelist is able to tailor creative to incorporate the messages, language, and tone audiences are using at the current moment and effectively speak directly to them, rather than building creative which is solely based on statistical reach and audience metrics."

Their general social media  metrics are nothing new. It is the list of KPIs that we have all been tracking: unique visitors, page views, visits, interaction rate, time spent, etc.. The new territory (for IAB) is their method for assessing the conversation space.

• Conversation Size means they are now looking across the social Web for relevant mentions of an advertisers campaign language. This is the equivalent of Ogilvy's Conversation Criteria which I would argue is a more relevant approach than:

"Number of Conversation Relevant Sites: The count of sites in the conversation whose content contains conversation phrases from the client’s Request for Proposal (RFP) or Insertion Order (IO)."

• Site relevance - are their a lot of relevant mentions of topics that intersect with the brand

• Author Credibility - we have been doing this for years in our Influencer Maps and includes metrics from inbound links to earliest and latest relevant posts.

• Content Freshness and relevance - IAB is suggesting that beyond earliest and latest post that the delta in between or "Mean-time Between Posts" on a subject is important.

If your primary goal is to determine which social sites to advertise on, these all seem like useful metrics. The power of social media lies in between the advertising, however. It lies within the conversation itself. It's hard to see how the  IAB approach will account for the power of earned media.

Word of Mouth Marketing Association Metrics Best Practice Guidebook
Last week, WOMMA (discl:board member) released a draft of what hopes to be a very useful book for brand marketers on the fundamental building blocks of word of mouth marketing measurement. The draft will be revised between now and November. Still, it serves as a useful guidebook even now.

The WOMMA Metrics Guidebook covers the fundamentals of Conversation Volume and Share, Influencer Value and offers up examples of some of the ways companies are fashioning measurement models to guide perfomance metrics, advocacy valuation and even the ever-elusive "value of a conversation."

This will help marketers understand and share a vocabulary about what matters in measurement. There remains at least two extra steps to tackle to make this Guidebook all that it can be:

• A closer connection to the real ways marketers want to use social media. If you accept, as I do, that word of mouth marketing is a bigger tent yet inclusive of social media marketing, you must also agree that the main ring in that circus is social media. The Guidebook will be stringer if it ackoedges that marketers want to know now how to measure social media and make more direct mention of how they are doing that.

• Cast a broader net to capture more ways that more marketers are measuring social media. Our model, Conversation Impact, is not covered here and I assume that many others are not as well. Perhaps I am pining for more of a complete index than a "guidebook" but still, there is a lot of good thinking on measurement out there beyond what is currently captured in the Guidebook.  

Social Media Advertising Consortium
The new kid on the block, SMAC has developed in a small corner of the social media "in-crowd" as a non-profit association determined to make sense of the value and impact of paid evertising in social media. What they will accomplish beyond what IAB sets out to do remains unclear. Looking at the membership with nary an ad agency in sight, I am guessing that they will focus on the combined impact for marketers of paid and earned media in this landscape.  Here's what they say about themselves:

"In 2009, social network advertising revenues will hit an estimated $1.825 billion.* Yet the industry is still fuzzy on the details – what they’re selling, what they’re buying, and how to measure success. As a result, players, big and small, are eager to unite to find solutions for social media’s challenges.

SMAC fosters collaboration throughout the entire social media ecosystem, diving deep into critical issues and staying ahead of this constantly evolving industry. By bringing together buy side, sell side, and research professionals to develop relevant standards, comprehensive research and definitive measurement tools, our goal is to grow revenues and increase engagement."

Advertising Research Foundation
The forum for paid media modeling, ARF has been scartching in the dirt trying to find meaning behind the concept of "engagement" for a few years. There efforts led to this slightly etherial gem of a definition for engagement: "Turning on a prospect to a brand idea enhanced by the surrounding context."

They are a good forum for those of us who really care about meaningful masurement. their Audience Measurement 4.0 conference is on June 23 + 24 in NYC.

Most of the tracks in AM4.0 are not about WOM or social media. At least two of the tracks - The World of Social Media & Search Measurement & The Value of Cross-Media, Engagement & Influencer Marketing - deal directly with what we are most concerned with. Of all of the 'too many' social media conferences on the horizon, this is one that I consider essential and is likely to remain so for the next few years.

i-COM
Based in Europe, these folks are trying to bind all of the relevant Web associations internationally to come together via a series of events. They want to drive collaboration on standards and ways to measure. Their field of vision is greater than social media and includes all of what we consider "digital." They are a forum for conversation and debate not a binding body, per se. It is still early yet to know whether this will lead to more generally accepted social media marketing metrics but the intent is good - invite everyone to the table.

Conversation Impact
We have been planning and deploying social media programs for 5 years. we started by simply reporting relevant metrics. Sometimes this was like public relations "output" reporting (how many blog posts, comments, videos-posted, etc...). We graduated to a more menaingful "impact-based" model that we call Conversation Impact. We will discuss this model at the upcoming ARF Audience Measurement 4.0 summit in NYC.

We are jumping ahead to a credible and simple model that makes sense to brand marketers and can be implemented for most campaigns without requiring federal bailout dollars to underwrite the measurement plan. Using a mix of traditoinal Web metrics and new Listening Post methodology, we combine web behavior reporting and social media-based word of mouth to report against three big (and meaningful) categories: Reach, Preference and Action.

We purposely move beyond the trap of trying to quantify or value "engagement" and jump to what matters more to marketers - did we increase product preference?

Our model is open. Anyone can use it. the formulas are all revealed. we shall see how much traction it gains in the marketplace going forward.  

______

Lots going on from across different organizations. That seems as it should be for now. We need as many brains thinking this through as possible. Eventually, we need some 'coming together' around how to measure both the earned and paid side of using social media and, most importantly, the combineed effect of both. Will that be some combination of WOMMA and IAB working together? Will groups like SMAC step up to fill a legitimate void? Too early to tell.

Social Media Marketing Measurement: Are We More Than 33% There Yet?

  Nothing has been more important than developing a credible, workable measurement model for our social media-based programs at Ogilvy. Having participated in many of the forums where masrement geeks come together to test-drive their models, it became clear last year that we were all still in the first third of the process. If you think of the inevitable arc of standards development, the first third is floating meaningful measures - no matter how convluted the model - marketers want to know that there are valuable metrics that even exist to justify spending in word of mouth-based social media.

First Third of the Social Media Marketing Measurement Life Cycle
Everyone starts with KPIs (key perfomance indicators) they find compelling. We have 100,000 video views (over 1 month? 6 months? 1 year?). Our Facebook page has accumulated almost 30,000 fans/friends. Our blog mentions add up to a fat 2m UMVs (unique monthly views). KPIs are often without a lot of context. It is safe to say that we are passing through this phase.

Second Third of the Social Media Marketing Measurement Life Cycle
As critics punch holes - rightly so - in the pure KPI model, academic braniacs develop rigorous models in response. Walter Carl's work at ChatThreads (previously at Northeastern) seem to fit here. An extremely smart guy, all you have to do is spend a half hour with Walter and you will be convinced about the strength of his process for matchbacks and other techniques that really do ratify the spread of WOM. You will of course need to hire his company to actually apply the principles.These methods are persuasive, rigorous yet like the Eniac computer, they may require more effort and shelf space than most marketing programs can afford. So, we simplify. I am certian Walter is doing the same. That is the driving pressure behind our modelling at Ogilvy. Conversation Impact was developed to provide a credible and implementable measurement model that could be applied to most projects without a separate budget allocation. We needed a simple model that made sense to brand marketers. These simpler models are still in the early stages. It will be at least a year before 2-3 of them emerge as "leading" contenders. Ours is open to anyone to use and we will see if it gains velocity (presenting next month at ARF).

Meanwhile, brands that explore the more complex and more meaningful measurement models inevitably backslide into KPIs. You can hear it now from your most senior brand marketers, "Can't we just reduce all this complex modeling to 2-3 numbers we care about most? Numbers that reflect how much reach or how much time people are spending with the brand. What if we just count video views and Tweets?"    

Final Third of the Social Media Marketing Measurement Life Cycle
This remains a glimmer in my eye. Once we have the solid and simple modeling out of the second third, we need to ramp up quickly for the inevitable: complexity. The real power of social media marketing is when it becomes integrated into all sorts of communications and marketing - ALL sorts. What is the impact of social media mentions on the performance of adjacent advertising - does it make the ads perform 3x, 10x, 30x better? When frequency of ad impressions fades away as a lynchpin metric, what is the most effective forumla of organic conversation with a brand and the paid media that drives action? As brands explore beyond their microsite-based online marketing to include their presence in Facebook, Linked In or Orkut, what formula will explain how that online footrpint adds up to meaningful action and/or intent to purchase?

Miles to go before we sleep. Lots going on in measurement of social media right now. Still, I wonder some days if we have even made it through the first third of our journey.  

How Are Brands Handling Social Media in Brazil

People like Michel Lent, Carla Meneghini, and Renata Saraiva at Ogilvy have developed a great integrated approach to social media marketing and digital influence programs. They live and work in Sao Paulo which I can only describe from my naive pov as the New York City of Brazil, if not of the overall region. It is a kick-ass city with more culture, food and commerce than any I have visited in a while. Traffic too, but that's another story.

We met with many brands last week. They are all taking social media very seriously. As in many markets there is a range of brand adoption behaviors including:

• Brands who want to put listening programs in place to understand what consumers are saying about them in blogs, Orkut and Twitter

• Brands fascinated with Twitter and ready to accept that platform as a microcosm of cgm chatter

• Brands looking to a number of partners - small and big - for guidance and not always getting the best recomendations (In my opinion)
• Brands looking to their traditional agencies and to new boutiques (there are a few new social media boutiques using simple cgm listening capabilities to build business)
• Brands embracing the idea of new influencers and inviting them to interact with the brand
• An emphisis on using social media without clear expectations around realistic measurement and impact
• Brand marketers looking at social media as a channel (pitfall)
• Communications execs trying to make the case at the C-suite level for the relevance and impact of social media marketing and communications

It's all good, essentially. Brazil is such a big and fast-growing market. The key to all of this is how fast the market is growing. With 197 million people and 68 million on the internet (35%), there is a critical mass of people and influencers that can drive marketing and communications.

There are always limits on infrastructure - how fast can we grow 35% to 50% by sheer "pipe" alone? How can we go from 6.8 million broadband users to 10 million? Still, just keep an eye on adoption curves - how fast Brazilians grabbed onto Orkut and Twitter - these tell a story of a market that will explode in a blink of an eye. And the marketing and communications professionals at the brands seem to know it. 

Some facts about Brazil (from Globotrends wiki):

• BR - 196,342,587 population - Country Area: 8,544,418 sq km
• 67,510,400 users as of Dec/08, 34.4% penetration, per ITU.
• 6,788,100 Broadband subs as of Nov.26/08, per ITU, 3.5% p.r.

Audience Measurement 4.0: Our Social Media Model

 Come to the Advertising Research Foundation event in NYC - Audience Measurement 4.0 where Irfan Kamal and I will present our new model for measuring the perfomance of social media-based programs - Conversation Impact (tm).

We are thrilled to be on the agenda. ARF is a prestigious forum and we feel strongly about adopting usable measurement criteria for social media. Our  model reports meaningfully and simply on Reach, Preference and Action. The "Preference" section uses formulas that we hope most will find compelling and clear like:

"Share of positive voice in category (=Sentiment index for brand / sentiment index for category), # / % change, consumers reached vs. all, Cost per Increase in Share of Positive Sentiment (CPISP)"

• What: ARF's Audience measurement 4.0

• When: June 23-24

• Where: NYC

How can you get a discount? Follow these steps to get a special discount of $345 off the registration fee from ARF and Ogilvy:

ARF Members: $1,150
Non-Members: $1,650
(Pricing Valid until Friday, May 22nd, 2009)


1. Go to MyARF (http://my.thearf.org/Default.aspx)
2. Log-in or create an account
3. Register for 6/23/09 - 6/24/09 -2009 Audience [ME]asurement 4.0
4. Select ‘Full Conference Registration”
5. Enter code “FRIEND” in the promo code box in the top right-hand corner of the screen

View the program: http://www.thearf.org/assets/am-09-program

3 Compelling Twitter Visualizations

A lot of folks are mashing up Twitter to come up with interesting sub services and some neat visualizations.As more people join and more people are. And as more people spend more time on the service, it's becoming more and more useful for marketers to look for insight in what is said on just Twitter, itself.  You might expect marketers to discount the bias or inside-baseball quality of Twitter but not so. I know one marketer who made a very persuasive argument about revenue missed from just negative mentions on Twitter alone. New visualizations are springing up every day and offering intersting views of what people are talking about. Here's three:

TwitterThoughts is a cool interactive chart that not only plots topics over a period of time but will actually show you an animated timeline of keyword topics.

TweetVolume lets you input about 5 keywords to see overall volume of Tweet mentions. It's not clear over what period of time the data spans but it still is interesting in that simple Blogpulse kinda way.  

TwitterFountain mashes up tweets and Flickr images and is billed as a neat way to add dimension to event coverage. The next time you go to a conference - WOMM U 2009, let's say - participants upload and tag images and tweets are overlaid via hashtags.